le patrimoine culturel immatériel: enjeux d’une nouvelle catégorie edited by...

Reviews

Berry, Nicole S. 2010. Unsafe motherhood:Mayan maternal mortality and subjectivity inpost-war Guatemala. New York and Oxford:Berghahn Books. 268 pp. Hb.: $85.00. ISBN9781845457525.

In Unsafe Motherhood anthropologist NicoleBerry looks beneath the surface of the globalmaternal health campaign and shows howconflicting understandings around birth im-pede attempts to make pregnancy safer. Inter-viewing health workers, midwives, and localwomen and their families in Santa Cruz,Guatemala, Berry finds that the biomedicalestablishment has wrong assumptions aboutwomen’s understandings of pregnancy, birthand their own selves. Berry argues that, bymaking ‘modern’ alternatives to homebirthuncomfortable, culturally incompatible expe-riences, these misunderstandings are at the rootof the issue.

Central to Berry’s theoretical frameworkis the concept of ‘biosocial subjectivities’.Berry uses the term subjectivity to refer ‘tosomeone’s own understanding of his or herplace in the world’ (p. 5). Biosocial, on theother hand, highlights the importance of bio-logical processes in shaping this understanding,and in particular how these processes affectone’s social relations. Because ‘traditional’birth in Santa Cruz involves not just thepregnant woman and the midwife, but theformer’s in-laws and husband (with the hus-band literally holding up his wife), childbirth,Berry argues, is a critical site for ‘creating andreinstating’ these biosocial subjectivities.

By focusing on the physiology of birthand of the mother (what Berry calls the ‘biolog-icalization of birth’) the medical establishmentpromotes an autonomous understanding of theself. Berry’s central contention is that thesemade-up, autonomous subjectivities clash withpeople’s mutually constituted, relational sub-

jectivities. This disagreement, Berry claims,threatens people’s identities and makes themreluctant to seek biomedical care.

The major strength of Berry’s book has todo with the force of her theoretical framework.Many young anthropologists put forth frame-works that must be awkwardly contorted in or-der to explain various phenomena. In contrast,Berry’s framing of the ‘safe motherhood prob-lem’ as a clash between different conceptionsof subjectivity seamlessly illuminates a widerange of issues. The notion that differences inthe ways of thinking are at the core of people’sreluctance to adopt better health practices iswidely accepted, but the idea is too general tobe usefully applied. This is why Berry’s workis so valuable: by narrowing the focus from‘different ways of thinking’ to ‘different waysof seeing oneself ’, Berry provides a far moreapplicable model. Of course, understandinghow a person sees herself is still not an easytask (for starters, that person is unlikely to havea good idea of it herself). Still, the jump from‘thinking’ to ‘self-perception’ is a significantone, and Berry’s book is a testament to theusefulness of this applicable model.

Yet, even if the applicability of Berry’stheoretical model is the major strength ofthe book, at times she goes too far in tryingto make every anecdote support her thesis.One of the recurring themes in the book ishow ‘profoundly uncomfortable’ giving birthin hospitals can be for poor Mayans. WhileBerry offers plenty of constructive examples,she seems to contradict herself at times, forexample when asserting that the fact that familymembers are allowed to be present in the deliv-ery room demonstrates health workers’ lack ofconcern for their patients’ dignity. Consideringthat one of her central points concerns thebenefits of communal homebirths, to say thatthe presence of family members during hos-pital births is uncomfortable implicates their

94 Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2013) 21, 1 94–122. C© 2013 European Association of Social Anthropologists.doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12004

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presence during homebirths is uncomfortableas well.

Despite such minor flaws, Unsafe Moth-erhood is an extremely valuable book thatsheds light not only on the obstacles to makingmotherhood safer, but to improving the healthof poor populations in general. By challengingthe reader to seek to understand how otherpeople see themselves, their bodies and theirbiological processes, Berry’s book promises toimprove how aspiring global health workersthink about health and development. Writtenin clear, simple language, the book shouldbe read by undergraduates in anthropology,sociology and development studies (includingeconomics) all the way to professionals in thesefields. Unpretentious but deeply thoughtful,Berry’s book provides the field of medicalanthropology with an exemplary piece ofwork.

JAKE COHENYale University (USA)

Birkenmaier, Anke and Esther Whitfield(eds.) 2011. Havana beyond the ruins: cul-tural mappings after 1989. Durham andLondon: Duke University Press. 344 pp. Pb.:$24.95. ISBN 978-0-8223-5052-1.

This beautifully edited book is a sui generisexperiment in exploring the present and imag-ining the future of Havana beyond its ruins– colonial, capitalist and socialist – by bring-ing together contributions of Cuban scholars(living inside and outside Cuba) and other non-Cuban specialists in various disciplines (archi-tecture, history, literary studies and sociology).Even though anthropologists are absent fromthis collection, its theoretical and empiricalexplorations are strongly resonating with a re-cent upsurge of interest in the anthropology ofruin(ation) (Dawdy 2010), under the influenceof Walter Benjamin’s unfinished yet brilliantexplorations of 19th-century Paris (Benjaminand Tiedemann 1999).

Cuban essayist and writer Antonio JosePonte, in dialogue with W. Benjamin, W.G.

Sebald and G. Simmel, has provided an originalinterpretation of the relationship between ru-ins and politics in contemporary Havana. Hiscontribution to this volume, ‘La Habana: Cityand Archive’, delivers his vision of Havanaas a landscape where the politics of memory,urban policies and socialist power produceand re-signify urban ruins. According to him,‘the decayed landscape justifies the discourseof resistance exported by the revolutionaryregime, and justifies its rhetoric of a besiegedcity’ (p. 264). There is ‘an art of making ru-ins’, which serves the revolutionary power byinstantiating a vision of a permanent externalthreat to the Revolution. Ponte underscoresthe ethical and political aspects of rememberingfor the present and the future of Havana. Heintegrates post-socialist Eastern Europe intohis argument in order to warn Cubans againstthe danger of amnesia and urban planningas erasure of socialist traces and against ‘thedanger of seeing the revolutionary period as anempty pause’ (p. 265) between two forms ofcapitalism.

The imagining of the future of Havanaamong Cuban-American architects as dis-cussed in Nicolas Quintana’s contribution istied to political ideas of liberalism and the idealof a total sustainable environment. However,this vision is hampered by a shared illusionof a Havana ‘frozen in time’ or trapped in a‘time capsule’ (p. 107). The plans developedin Florida project Havana as a cruise-shipand fishing port in the service of tourism,without any industrial activities. However,what is puzzling in these development plansfor a post-Castro Havana is the lack of dis-cussion of the property restitution topic, ahighly controversial political question acrossthe two strains of the Florida channel. Acursory survey of this topic in post-socialistEastern Europe shows that without clarifyingthe status of property in a post-Castro period,all architecture and development plans willremain pure speculation. Collective forms ofcommunity building and renovation projects,as analysed in another chapter by Jill Hamberg,could potentially play an important role in thefuture reconstruction of the city, especially bypreventing gentrification processes.

C© 2013 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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Mario Coyula, arguably the most presti-gious Cuban architect living in Cuba today,writes about current debates among fellowintellectuals concerning the revolutionary cul-tural politics, many being critical of the 1970shighly authoritative cultural politics. He con-siders that Cuban architecture was harshly af-fected by technocratic fetishism and repressionof individual creativity from the mid-1960sup to the present. His criticism is partly self-critical (sincere apology, rhetorical strategy orboth) since Coyula himself participated in col-lective assemblies for the expulsion of fellowstudents and architects accused of ideologicaldeviationism and elitism, as he acknowledgesin the text. He depicts Havana as an increas-ingly dystopian place with a declining civicculture and deplores the spread of popularforms of housing design inspired by Miamiarchitecture or other kitschy Latin Americaninfluences. Paradoxically in respect to hiscriticism of authoritarian approaches, Coyulaargues for a harsher state policy (includingdemolition) to these illegal modifications andunauthorised new constructions.

It is to one of these vernacular types ofhousing modification that Patricio del Realand Joseph Scarpaci dedicate their chapter,‘Barbacoas: Havana’s New Inward Frontier’.These are platforms (made mostly of wood)that subdivide a room into an upper and alower level and answer the need of findingmore habitable space and extra privacy in in-creasingly overcrowded buildings. The authorsargue against the idea of city inhabitants beingportrayed as passive victims of the Cubanpolitics of ruins. Based on their ethnographic,participatory and archival research they claimthat barbacoas are not a socialist phenomenon,but go back into the colonial past, and seethem as forms of bricolage, defined by informaleconomy practices and gendered householdroles (women’s pre-eminent role in householdactivities, including house re-designing).

Emma Alvarez-Tabio’s chapter deals withthe muddled sense of time directionality incontemporary Cuba. She takes us back to the1980s, a Citizen’s Decade in her opinion, whenvarious participatory and bottom-up culturalinitiatives did create spaces for engagement

and reflections about the city’s architectureand planning. The 1990s crisis put an endto these potentialities and opened the city toglobal influences of capital and tourism, whileofficial urban planning still functions on ananti-market principle.

Sujatha Fernandes explores the waysyoung black Cubans from marginal neigh-bourhoods, such as the Soviet-style housingproject Alamar, use rap music to express theircriticism of growing economic inequalitiesand racial discriminatory practices on the riseduring the Special Period. Nevertheless, theemigration of preeminent musicians, internalpolitical divisions and co-optation from thestate are major factors that explain the tamingof the resistance potential of the Cuban hip-hop movement.

Several chapters explore how Havanais represented and imagined by contem-porary Cuban writers such as RonaldoMenendez (Laura Redruello’s chapter), PedroJuan Gutierrez, Antonio Jose Puente (CeceliaLawless), Eliseo Alberto, Leonardo Paduraand Senel Paz (Rafael Rojas). JacquelineLoss’s fascinating exploration of recent artisticprojects in Havana, which engage criticallywith state socialism and the Soviet’s influenceon Cuban society, reveals a city plagued byschizophrenia, delirium and alienation, lessconfident in a revolutionary bright future. JoseQuiroga’s essayistic contribution is the closestto a Benjaminian exploration of Havana, withdialectical images of music, plastic bags, glassesand sandwiches with guava and cheese.

The reader might be bewildered by sucha diversity of themes and approaches, but thisis largely due to the palimpsest character ofthe city itself. It is the merit of the editorsto have brought together such a diversity ofviewpoints, also by organising the translationfrom Spanish of most contributions. How-ever, anthropologists and urban sociologistsreading this book will miss a more system-atic empirical exploration of social practicesand materiality in contemporary Havana thatwould have brought this collection closer tothe spirit of Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Allin all, this book should be considered anexploratory account that will hopefully incite


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more anthropologists to investigate the currenttransformations of Havana, arguably the LatinAmerican capital of the 20th century.

ReferencesBenjamin, W. and R. Tiedemann. 1999. The

arcades project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.Dawdy, Shannon L. 2010. ‘Clockpunk anthro-

pology and the ruins of modernity’, CurrentAnthropology 51: 761–93.

MARIAN VIOREL ANASTASOAIEUniversity College London (United Kingdom)

Bortolotto, Chiara (ed.) 2011. Le patrimoineculturel immateriel: enjeux d’une nouvellecategorie. Paris: Editions de la Maison dessciences de l’homme. 320 pp. Pb.: €21.ISBN 9782735114177.

Since the pioneering works of historians likeNora, Hobsbawm and Lowenthal in the 1980s,heritage studies has become a large and richinterdisciplinary field. Over the past decade,anthropologists have invested it with particularenergy. This French collection of essays notonly stands as a manifestation of this surge ofinterest, but also deals directly with the politi-cal event that might have triggered it in the firstplace: the invention of the notion of ‘intangibleheritage’ and its international consecration as acategory of public policy through UNESCO’sConvention for the Safeguarding of IntangibleHeritage in 2003.

Bortolotto’s editorial introduction an-chors the collection with a general presentationof the Convention’s main features as identifiedin both her previous work and this volume’sessays. These include the controversial ‘list’of valuable items, a device modelled on pro-cedures of historic preservation; the Conven-tion’s promotion of a type of multiculturalismin which communities of practitioners areboth objects and actors of the designationprocess, yet depend completely on nationalstates’ endorsement; and the problematic role

of experts in a designation process that issupposed to rest on local knowledge.

The first part of the book focuses onthe kind of political structures and relationsfostered by the Convention. Maguet providesa Habermasian–Honnethian account of a mul-ticultural public sphere that forms througha triangular relation between national states,markets and communities of practitioners thatoften do not pre-exist the designation processitself. Using a post-Foucaultian lens, Hafsteinlooks at these communities as a neoliberal‘governmental’ dispositif of subjectivation andsubjection. His analysis of the Bolivian originsof the Convention throws a sharp light ona fascinating irony of history: Third Worldresistance to appropriation of local musicby the global (US) music industry merelyperpetuated the power of national states andthrough it global capitalist hegemony. In heranalysis of the relationship between heritageand inheritance, Bendix deducts from theirsemantic equivalence some practical aspectsof the mutual dependency between the moralregime governing heritage preservation and thelegal-economic regime of modern ownership.

The second section of the volume isresolutely empirical. Four case studies offerprecious insights into the Convention’s impacton the ‘communities’ it invokes into being.Noyes’ brief but systematic political historyof La Patum de Berga festival (Catalonia)provides a remarkably effective illustration ofthe theoretical analyses provided in Part 1 –and more generally of the suitably historicistthesis according to which a heritage eventis ‘neither an expression of some primitivecommunity, nor the product of some power’sinvention, nor the manifestation of some peo-ple’s revolutionary spirit (. . .) but a formalcompromise resulting from a long and difficultnegotiation between social forces’ (p. 129).Fournier focuses on the substantive aspectsof such formal compromise, showing howthe designation of a Provencal festival (theTarasque, in Tarascon) consecrated one of thelatest and most innocuous forms it had ac-quired over the centuries, but also the resoluteinterpretative flexibility of participants whoconstantly reinvent the ritual. Macchiarella’s


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analysis of Sardinia’s canto a tenore fore-grounds the contradictions of the UNESCOdesignation system. Supposed to foster thedevelopment of living communities of artisticproducers, it remains seemingly unable toassess value without some version of the debili-tating criterion of authenticity (embodied hereby the list). Bonvoisin and Bartholeyns delivera somewhat puzzling performance of analysis-fiction. Examining whether live-action role-play could be considered intangible heritage,the essay exposes some limits of the concept,such as (again) its ignorance of the creativitythat defines lived practice.

In the book’s final section, two essaysquestion the role of experts in the makingof intangible heritage. Tornatore discusses thereplacement of the scholar-centric model ofintangible heritage policy established in Franceat the end of the 1970s under the nameof patrimoine ethnologique by the kind ofpractitioner-centric model promoted by UN-ESCO’s convention. Somewhat contradict-ing the French thesis of scholars’ destitution(seemingly shared by the editor and by theMinistry of Culture sponsors of this volume),the story of Brazil’s Samba de Roda analysedby Sandroni in the last chapter demonstratesthat the labour of scholars and experts easilyoverrides the local community when it comesto create a symbolic inheritance that did notexist and was not perceived as such before.

The book works as an interesting andinformative companion volume to what re-mains the reference collection on the subject(Smith and Akagawa’s 2009 Intangible Her-itage), with a French twist that is not withoutspecial insights. The question of knowledgeproduction insistently raised in the preface,in the introduction and in Tornatore’s essay isparticularly interesting, for example. One canactually regret that more space and attentionis not granted to the role of anthropologistsboth in the genesis and in the practice of‘intangible heritage’ policy. Given the impactof scholarly interests on heritage policy forma-tion since the 19th century, the odds are thatthis role is somewhat greater than is suggestedboth by UNESCO ideology, which stressescommunity empowerment, and by the French

anthropologists’ perspective, which appears toconsider it a primarily ‘political’ product.

ReferenceSmith, L. and N. Akagawa (eds.) 2008. Intangible

heritage. Oxford: Routledge.

ALEXANDRA KOWALSKICentral European University (Hungary)

Chibnik, Michael. 2011. Anthropology, eco-nomics, and choice. Austin: University ofTexas Press. 210 pp. Pb.: $24.95. ISBN97802927290.

Michael Chibnik dedicates his book to show-ing the relation between anthropology andeconomics in explaining decision-making. Asthe author claims in the preface, althougheconomic anthropology is less influential thanmainstream economics, ‘it presents an impor-tant, iconoclastic challenge to conventionalways of looking at choice’ (p. vii). The wholework is the author’s attempt to prove thisthesis. To do so, Chibnik builds his discus-sion around classical issues that economicsattempts to solve. The main chapters aim toshow how the ethnography-based reasoningof anthropologists differs from the ways inwhich economists understand and researchchoice and how both perspectives are valuablein solving those issues.

Chapter one introduces the issues dis-cussed in the book: Chibnik starts with astory of his fieldwork in Belize and depictsthat experience as an impulse to consider theimportance and limitations of economics, soci-ology and anthropology in studying decision-making processes. The following chapters con-tain a discussion of five different subjects andoutline how the disciplinary paradigms differin understanding economic phenomena. Chap-ter two shows the strengths and weaknessesof calculations of the ‘utility’ of unpaid work.The author uses numerous examples, such ashis own research on valuing crops consumed


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at home, and concludes that estimating unre-munerated work, although posing a number oflimitations, is an important source for studyingchoices. Chapter three outlines the under-standings of decision-making in the conditionsof risk and uncertainty. Chibnik stresses howthe experiments of cognitive psychologists andmodels of economists should be accompaniedby anthropologists’ ethnography-based de-scriptions. Chapter four is devoted to assessingeconomic experimental games conducted byanthropologists, whose conclusions, as Chib-nik shows using a problem from his ownresearch, have a limited scope of application.Chapter five concentrates on the limitationsof using the household as a unit of analysis forunderstanding decision-making processes. Theauthor concludes that this type of reasoningmight be fruitful in certain situations, espe-cially for anthropologists. However, it oughtto be under the condition of building ‘detailedethnographic descriptions and analyses of howparticular important household-level choicesare made in different times and places’ (p. 141).Finally chapter six problematises the axiom ofthe ‘tragedy of commons’ and some mathe-matical models of rational-choice following it,pointing out numerous ethnographic examplesthat provide an alternative view on the issue.His examples reveal rules and institutionsembedded in culture that protect communitiesfrom tragedies. The conclusion repeats themain arguments of the book and puts forththe necessity for further interaction based onthe complementary character of economics andanthropology in studying choice.

The book is essential to any economicanthropologist reflecting on the role of thediscipline and its relationship to other socialsciences. Chibnik ably answers these questionsand provides a complex introduction to howeconomic anthropologists go about their stud-ies. The author’s research experience and histhorough understanding of economic anthro-pology become evident in the book, whichaccurately portrays the sins scholars from bothsides are tempted to commit. For instance,‘economists too often oversimplify, make un-realistic assumptions, ignore history and cul-ture’ and ‘anthropologists too often express

ideas imprecisely, mindlessly oppose quan-tification, and refuse to generalize’ (p. 171).Chibnik not only reviews the voices of scholarsstudying the issues in question but also usesexamples from his entire work that constitute avaluable source of argumentation. Besides that,his examples provide an interesting perspectiveon Chibnik’s intellectual trajectory over almost40 years, showing how the field problemsfound at the earliest stages of his academiccareer developed into further projects andinfluenced the conclusions of this book.

The language and outline of Anthropol-ogy, Economics, and Choice allows it to serveas a supplementary, yet important, reading forundergraduate courses in economic anthropol-ogy. The problems addressed in the volumein an interdisciplinary manner can also be ofgreat value for a broader range of scholars, whowill appreciate the insightful discussion aboutthe role of the discipline in solving economicproblems and understanding choice. In thissense the book has the potential to become animportant contribution to economic anthro-pology, and interest economists, sociologistsand psychologists in an equal manner.

MILOSZ MISZSCZYNSKIInstitute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University(Poland)

Eguavoen, Irit. 2008. The political ecology ofhousehold water in Northern Ghana. Vol. 10ZEF Development Studies. Berlin: Lit Verlag.328 pp. Pb.: €34.90. ISBN 978-3-8258-1613-1.

In essence, Irit Eguavoen’s study is a dero-manticised (hi)story of water in the village ofSirigu in Northern Ghana. Her research wasconceived and conducted within the framesof an applied project ‘Global Change of theHydrological Cycle’ (GLOWA) in the Voltariver basin. Its principal aim was to recordand analyse mutually related changes of therespective natural environment and the humanagency within it. The results could not providesubstantial solutions to general development


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issues in this semi-arid African region, but theyoffer insight into the challenges of freshwatersupply in rural and peri-urban environments.The author’s epistemic position acknowledgesthe dynamic interrelationality of natural andsocial phenomena; thus in her work the localreality – village water shortages – is approachedand apprehended holistically. While analysingdifferent aspects of dealing with water fromeveryday domestic needs and uses of water, tocognitive, normative and legal schemes withregard to water, institutional water resourcemanagement, political discourses and popularnarratives on water resource degradation, shetakes into account both micro/macro andlocal/global dynamics.

In socio-cultural contexts natural re-sources transcend their natural dimension, sowater could be regarded as a socio-culturalartefact due to the activities involved in house-hold water ‘production’. The village understudy faces major challenges in this respect,which go beyond environmental and climaticrestraints. Water supply facilities (most com-monly hand-dug wells and boreholes withhand pumps) are provided by governmentprogrammes, big external donor agencies andsmall NGOs. Financially, Ghanaian rural com-munities largely depend on external help, i.e.international development interventions, sincethe donors take on the biggest share (93%) forproject implementation. Although the dom-inant policy paradigm in Ghana encouragesparticipatory models of water resources man-agement and inclusion of water users indecision-making processes, its application issuccessful only in urban environments, be-cause the state is basically withdrawing fromrural and small town managerial schemes. Thefinancial burden placed on rural communitiesand the lack of skilled water professionalsand clear regulation of management respon-sibilities are reflected most obviously in themalfunctioning and abandonment of biggerpiped water works, as is the case in Sirigu.Consequently, every time the village waterinfrastructure is left unattended, the conse-quences are dire.

Speaking in legal terms, water in Ghana isperceived as a (non-exclusive) right for every-

one, which is determined by the local waterlaw. The latter is incorporated into (strictlyspeaking, it coincides with) the statutory waterlegislation implemented by international (UN)regulations. Various normative levels, as inthis case, form a situation of legal pluralismin which different interest groups, competingfor limited water resource and protectingtheir water rights, can call on diverse legaloptions. In Eguavoen’s words, this ‘providesa coping strategy to deal with environmental,livelihood, and social and political uncertaintyas well as with knowledge uncertainty’ (p. 20).The knowledge domain is another sphere ofthe local/global polarisation. The narrativesabout the underprivileged economic situationin Northern Ghana (and elsewhere in Africa)are predominantly based on western scientificdiscourses that appeal to the unfavourablegeographic reality of drought, deforestation,overgrazing, soil erosion etc. However, lim-ited natural resources are only part of thestory. The legacy of developmental neglect,the application of inappropriate colonial andpost-colonial resource management practices(economic overexploitation) and the ignoranceof traditional environmental knowledge andlocal socio-ecologic relationships contributeto the formation of a perspective in whichwater un/availability can be seen as an outcomeof complex geo-hydrological, socio-politicaland institutional factors. But the ability tograsp this is not the exclusive privilege ofscientists. In her detailed ethnographic accountof Sirigu’s watery landscape, Eguavoen showsthat water shortage in local perceptions isnot understood as scarcity; people are awareof fundamental financial and technical limi-tations to access potable water. Their locallyoriented collective efforts to create and sustainadditional water sources often fall short, butwithin further development planning theirvoice and knowledge could and must be ac-knowledged. What cannot fall short in this caseare the efforts of anthropologists to make themheard.

URSKA STRAZISARUniversity of Ljubljana (Slovenia)


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Empson, Rebecca M. 2011. Harnessing for-tune. Personhood, memory and place inMongolia. Oxford and New York: Publishedfor the British Academy by Oxford UniversityPress. 398 pp. Hb: £65.00. ISBN 978-0-19-726473-7.

This ambitious and scholarly ethnographyexplores how the Buriad of Mongolia, a peo-ple who traverse the border zone betweentwo countries, and have no private land orstate of their own, accumulate possessions,and harness loss and absence, to generate aproliferation of relations. Historically, theyhave lived under intense persecution duringthe socialist period, when most of their malerelatives were either killed or taken away. Likeother post-socialist communities they nowconfront the rise of a market-oriented culture.Rebecca Empson observes a forceful revival ofancestral and other related ritual activities. Asense of absence from place and kin permeatesmany aspects of Buriad relations. A recentrevival of shamanism has given them access toa particular kind of genealogical knowledge,providing links to and explanations of theirfractured heritage. In tandem, a number oficonic and ritual practices have arisen, or beenrevived, which negotiate the tensions generatedby absence and separation from kin and fromland.

Empson provides intimate insights intoBuriad interiors, physical, spiritual and famil-ial. She identifies within the household cheststhat all Buriad families use to store treasuredpossessions, and in the photographic montagesthat decorate and dominate their domesticspaces, assemblages that bring relations intobeing through singular or juxtaposed thingsthat are deliberately displayed or concealedfrom view. These situate among a continuum ofpractices by which people are separated fromcertain connections in order to establish a moresingular mode of subjectivity. By illuminatingthis need to sever connections and enact dis-continuities between persons, Empson alludesto Strathern’s idea (1996) that curtailment andlimit is also a form of relationship.

The ‘fortune’ that supplies her title iscentral to Empson’s investigation. It is difficult

to determine its presence or quantity, buta portion of it can be harnessed, and itsfecundity may be brought into households.She compares this concept to the Polynesianconcept of ‘mana’, and to the Japanese practiceof ‘beckoning luck’. Since ‘fortune’ resideswithin herds and other collectivities, isolatingit in order to preserve or ‘harness’ it requiresof the Buriad an encompassing approach torelations with kin, with possessions, with theiranimals and, particularly, with the land acrosswhich they and their herds migrate. Empsonhighlights ceremonies conducted at the cairns,or ovoos, that are a ubiquitous feature ofthe Mongolian landscape. She observes thatthese practices reflect the notion that humansdo not hold land as they do other mundanepossessions, but enter into relations withthe spiritual powers of the locality to ensurefavourable conditions. Making offerings at theovoo is a means by which different interestgroups, including far-from-traditional onessuch as gold miners arriving in blacked-outjeeps, can visibly enact their good relationswith such spiritual stewards of the land, andclaim some form of custody over it. As theyroot themselves to the landscape by placatingits past inhabitants, the Buriad gain knowledgeof the past that becomes a kind of tool for thepresent.

Reflecting upon the widespread beliefin intra-kin rebirth, Empson argues that theabsence of certain people, and the lack ofconclusive reason for their disappearance,which is such a powerful phenomenon inrecent Buriad experience, persists in people’smemories through intra-kin rebirths as a ‘re-mainder’. This generates the possibility for theimagining of new subjects. With no official wayto commemorate their loss, rebirths are oneway in which people can tend to the disap-peared and silently incorporate them back intofamilies.

Harnessing Fortune contains much fur-ther richness of ethnographic detail, rang-ing from the particular role played by mir-rors in the Buriad construction of selfhood,to the frequent occurrence of arson attackson houses, which Empson compares withwitchcraft accusations in other, particularly


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post-colonial, communities where there aretensions consequent upon rupture with thepast, and where some seem to accumulatewealth and fortune effortlessly, while othersseem to have none of it at all. The book’s argu-ments are informed by such recent theoristsas Alfred Gell, Bruno Latour and EduardoVivieros de Castro. Yet though scholarly,Harnessing Fortune wears its learning lightly.Above all, Empson’s writing is suffused with adeeply personal connection to a people who,as she asserts, are not living in a way thatthey consider to be ‘transitional’. It is herconviction that the Buriads’ daily experiencetestifies to the power of Caroline Humphrey’sassertion that ‘the unmaking of earlier waysof living and the putting together of newones are always mutually constitutive’ (2002:xxiv).

ReferencesHumphrey, C. 2002. The unmaking of Soviet life:

everyday economies after socialism. Ithaca:Cornell University Press.

Strathern, M. 1996. ‘Cutting the network’, TheJournal of the Royal Anthropological Insti-tute incorporating Man 2: 517–35.

DOMINIC MARTINUniversity of Cambridge (UK)

Feyissa, Dereje. 2011. Playing differentgames. The paradox of Anywaa and Nuer iden-tification strategies in the Gambella region,Ethiopia. New York and Oxford: BerghahnBooks. 254 pp. Hb.: $95.00/£56.00. ISBN978-0-85745-088-3.

In 1995 a new constitution was adopted inEthiopia, introducing federal states based onethnic principles. While most states are thehome country of only one people with acommon language and culture, other states aremulti-ethnic, such as Gambella. Here the twomost important officially recognised groups

are Anywaa (or Anuak) and Nuer, both ofwhich are also at home in the adjoining areas ofSudan, with which Gambella shares a similarnatural environment. The relation betweenAnywaa and Nuer in Gambella is fraught withtension that erupts in violent clashes, as in 1998when in Itang, an area with a mixed population,a family quarrel escalated and 60 people werekilled, ten villages burned and 3000 personsdisplaced before a state of emergency wasdeclared after several months to end overthostilities. This came as a real shock for theauthor, an Ethiopian anthropologist who wasworking for an NGO in the state capital at thetime.

In the present study, based partly on laterresearch for a PhD degree, Feyissa providesus with an extended historical background forthis incident that was preceded and followedby several similar confrontations. He expertlyanalyses their intricate ramifications and inter-connected causes (although I sometimes feltthat his presentation could have benefited frommore and better maps). Many dimensions ofthe problem are shown to be relevant. At theinternational and national level they includethe way Gambella and its inhabitants weredrawn into the almost continual civil warfarein South Sudan since 1955, and the exploitationand manipulation of this conflict by succes-sive Ethiopian governments that pursued theirown interests rather than having the peaceand prosperity of its Gambella citizens atheart. At the regional level Feyissa considersamong other things the role of elites whocompete for salaried jobs through control overappointments and, indirectly, over access toeducation.

For ordinary villagers, the availability offarmland and pastures is of crucial impor-tance. Although in the early part of the 20thcentury Nuer use of pastures did not com-pete with Anywaa cultivation of crops, Nuercattle wealth and willingness to intermarryresulted in a faster population growth of Nuercommunities. The demographic balance andspatial distribution was altered even morewhen after 1983, as a result of the spread ofmodern firearms, groups of Sudanese Nuer


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were able to occupy Gambella areas for theirsole use and also caused well-established mi-grants belonging to other Nuer sections toseek refuge elsewhere. In the 1980s resettle-ment of Ethiopians from the Highlands inGambella after widespread and severe famineand the imports of cheap food for refugeecamps also had an adverse impact on Anywaafarming.

Although I have dealt here only with someof the aspects covered by Feyissa, it shouldbe clear that there was plenty of scope forattributing negative stereotypes by Anywaato Nuer and the other way around, blamingdirect competitors rather than what had causedcompetition in the first place. Feyissa sees theorigin of how Nuer and Anywaa perceive eachother in the way they experience their ownidentity, which corresponds to two differenttheories of ethnicity: the Nuer are ‘construc-tivists’ and the Anywaa are ‘primordialists’. Aspolar opposites, these identification strategiesallow Nuer to condemn Anywaa for resistingassimilation and Anywaa to accuse Nuer ofconspiring to annihilate them in the longrun. Granted that these terms may be use-ful metaphors to call them incommensurablelanguage games suggests that any form ofcommunication between Anywaa and Nuerwould be difficult, if not impossible, andwould deny the possibility of reconciliationand peaceful coexistence under different cir-cumstances. However, language use dependsnot only on semantic-referential meaning butalso on indexical meaning (pragmatics). Thatopens up the possibility that people might beable to discount political rhetoric (and mostexamples given by Feyissa are just that) incontexts of interaction where they believe thatdifferent values should prevail. From olderethnographies we learn that at least in thepast Nuer feuding was contained in that wayand that Anywaa were experts in distinguish-ing between what people say and what theyactually do.

Very sadly the situation of both Nuer andAnywaa has changed for the worse since 2005,which period is not covered in this book, aslarge tracts of fertile land have been leasedto foreign investors, apparently without any

consideration of the present and future welfareof the local inhabitants.

JAN DE WOLFUtrecht University (The Netherlands)

Fox, Katy. 2011. Peasants into Europeanfarmers? EU integration in the CarpathianMountains of Romania. Berlin: Lit Verlag.360 pp. Pb.: €34.90. ISBN 978-3-643-801074.

The volume under review offers an intrigu-ing combination of a ‘classic’ approach topostsocialism focused on processes of changesuch as decollectivisation, pluralisation andmarketisation, and an exploration of new sub-jectivities, of issues of resistance, personhoodand hope. The monograph draws on long-term fieldwork in two Romanian villages onthe south versant of the Carpathian Moun-tains and in the capital, Bucharest, in vari-ous agencies subordinated to the Ministry ofAgriculture.

As the title suggests, at the core of theargument lies the divide between peasantsand farmers created by modernist schemesinvolved in EU agricultural policies. The au-thor shows how this ideological divide, andthe broader neoliberal agenda to which itbelongs, impact real lives by creating hier-archies, categories and devaluation. At thesame time she shows how possibilities, hopesand resistance are interwoven in agriculturallivelihoods in the Romanian Carpathians. Atthe theoretical level, the author’s questionsexceed the particular eastern European contextappealing to anthropologists working in otherareas of the world affected by neoliberalprojects and enlightenment epistemologies ofrational choice and ‘modern ways’. Some of thequestions she raises reflect on ‘the differencesbetween political projects and life projects’(p. 32); the extent to which political projectsexert control over people and their resistanceto it (p. 37); and the ways in which peoplemake sense of their lives and cope with politicalprojects.


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Several chapters provide a fine-grainedanalysis of food and alcohol production andmeat processing and sale, examining in detailpig sticking practices, the restructuration ofmarkets and the meat sector, and the homedistillation of plum brandy. The author showshow restructuring local and national mar-kets led in practice to the acceleration ofcommercialisation and the creation of largeagribusiness, resulting in branded and certi-fied products, and, at the other end to theexclusion of small-scale producers. In light ofthese processes, traditional peasant’ identities,strongly interconnected with household-basedanimal husbandry, started to look belittled,and in response, peasants started questioningneoliberal logics of the market. In this eco-nomic game, small producers became losersand were being labelled ‘made in socialism’,as opposed to ‘winner’ producers that adoptedmore entrepreneurial strategies, going with thecapitalist flow.

Another tool for creating devaluation andhierarchies within villages was the EU policyof direct payments, described by the author inthe chapter ‘Implementing: Direct payments,land and confusion’. The entire procedure ofimplementing the policy created a cartographicillusion (moving from land as territory, whichis a ‘sensuous reality’, to land as a map) andsuggested an absolutely agentive model ofpersonhood, conceiving the person as self-made, ‘separate from her human companionsand her environments, and free’ (p. 176).

The book draws a rather pessimisticpicture about systematic devaluation and ex-clusion. The Common Agricultural Policy,based on normative notions of integration,information, training and welfare, proved to beunsuccessful in producing the intended effects,and triggered feelings of failure, hierarchies andpolarisation. Integration did not offer all ruralinhabitants the possibility to participate, sinceinformation about agricultural programmes,supposed to be diffused through institutions,did not reach out to peasants who were thenblamed for their ‘unawareness’.

As the peasants did not fit into theneoliberal logic, they started to feel inade-quate, powerless and immature, in need to be

‘colonised’ (p. 295) by expert know-how. Inthis context, Fox tries to capture the ‘collectivedrift of change’ (p. 237) and shows howordinary people were driven by and resortedto three kinds of intertwined ‘manoeuvres’(a concept she borrows from Gramsci), inorder to continue making a living. She de-picts ‘manoeuvres of limitation’, which makepeasants perceive their freedom of movementlimited by EU-driven policymakers that seekto codify reality in rigid frames (e.g. theregulation of transhumant movements and theban of sale of peasant produce on the market);‘manoeuvres of separation’, in which peoplemorally contrast a radiant past and futureto an unclear present, controlled by immoralmafia-like forces, promoters of inequality andtrickery, from which the peasants disconnect;and ‘manoeuvres of obfuscation’, as strategiesof vagueness and secrecy that kept decision-making open and illegal practices going.

The high intensity of the book, under-stood both as concentration of informationand passion with which the author tries tomake in-depth sense of complex realities, areat the same time its virtues and pitfalls. Alarge cluster of characters, events, trajectoriesand narrative snapshots, fitted into severaltheoretical frameworks might at times feel likean overflow of information and suffocate thereader. Nevertheless, the monograph treats ina powerful and novel manner various themes,while offering extensive ethnographic knowl-edge of the people involved, their manifoldideas, motivations and aspirations.

MONICA VASILEMax-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology(Germany)

Ghodsee, Kristen. 2011. Lost in transition.Ethnographies of everyday life after commu-nism. Durham and London: Duke UniversityPress. 232 pp. Pb.: $22.95. ISBN 978-0-8223-5102-3.

This publication is likely to evoke mixed feel-ings. On the one hand, it succeeds in bringing


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to life the changes that affected ordinary peoplein Bulgaria from the breakdown of the BerlinWall in 1989 till present. On the other hand,it leaves a lot unanswered. At the expenseof theory, the author explicitly commits toa thick ethnography of people’s experiencesof the transformation from state socialismto the EU-framed political democracy andmarket economy. Some of these stories aredocuments of individual lives; others are casesof ethnographic fiction, things that ring truealthough they might not have happened exactlyas described. Perhaps written for a Westernaudience influenced by the Cold War repre-sentations of communism as a grim, repres-sive reality, Ghodsee explores ‘postsocialist’ambivalence, nostalgia, the sense of loss andanger of Bulgarian individuals. By graduallyadding layers of complexity to the book,Ghodsee presents us with an adroit portrayalof her personal journey from a biased butinquiring teenager fearful of the imminentnuclear annihilation to a mature scholar awareof the dangers of prioritising the analysis ofthe political and economic systems in EasternEurope over people’s quotidian existence. Itwould have been impossible to understandfrom the former, structural point of view whatpeople miss most about socialism and how, inthe sea of change, they aim to preserve littlethings like a polite form of address, a flavourof coffee, or lost opportunities to realise one’sdream of winning a socialist competition, madeirrelevant in the 1990s.

The author taps into a rich repertoire ofsuspicions and conspiracy theories about com-munist and democratic elites, corruption andlack of transparency under different politicalgovernments in Bulgaria. This way Ghodseeavoids the black-and-white descriptions ofBulgarian socialism and of what came next.She juxtaposes, for example, the narrativeof a woman who was separated from herlover by the communist secret services witha story of a young Muslim woman who isnudged toward prostitution by postsocialisteconomic desperation, unemployment and in-security. An accurate description of consumershortages and smuggling of Western goodslike Heinz ketchup is implicitly related to

the new entrepreneurial adventures (basicallyscams to swap antique Bulgarian rugs forChinese plastic carpets) that take advantageof people’s poverty and ignorance of thetrue value of their possessions. Poignantly,Ghodsee explores how young people are tornbetween economic benefits of working in theWest, longing for a decent life at home, anddisappointment with the quality of life andhuman relations in Bulgaria. The whole book isan endless seesaw between initial optimism andsubsequent ‘disenchantment with the comingof democracy’ (p. 177).

I have found the book refreshing andeasy to read. This is not a masterpiece ofethnographic prose, but I would gladly rec-ommend it to undergraduate students who,as Ghodsee points out, struggle to understandwhy anybody would look warmly at a totali-tarian regime (p. 178). Ghodsee’s explanationis that relative economic security, appealingideological idioms of social justice and therhythms of daily lives compensated for theoverarching presence of the restrictive one-party regime. Where I disagree slightly withGhodsee is in her brief analysis of the rootsof disenchantment with the present system.For her ‘it is the process of transition and thepoor way it was handled in many countriesthat lies at the root of the growing nostalgia’(p. 183). However, the crucial question thatthe book does not answer is what kind oftransition Bulgarian people experience today.The ethnographic episodes of the late 1990swould suggest that this is how people feltat the time, but what about their nostalgiafor communism today? In a superficial sense,Bulgarians have reached their destination: thecountry has joined the European Union (al-though on unequal terms with other EUcountries). In this sense their formal transitionis over. Yet practically, no democracy, politicalinstitution or economic experiment is stable;the EU itself is caught in an on-going, difficult‘transition’ of a kind, and Bulgaria is part of thisprocess too. It is not clear why the uncertaintythat Ghodsee’s interlocutors face today isframed in the language of the postsocialisttransition when frustration with one’s actual,ordinary realities might be an intrinsic quality


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of socialism, democracy, capitalism and marketeconomy rather than of the poor handling oftransition as the author claims (pp. 184, 186).A more comparative agenda that would relatethe Bulgarian case to an overwhelming senseof disappointment with democracy-inspiredprojects across 20th and 21st century Europe(Mazower 1998) is likely to better answer thisquestion.

ReferenceMazower, M. 1998. Dark continent. Europe’s

twentieth century. London: Penguin Books.

GALINA OUSTINOVA-STJEPANOVICUniversity of Edinburgh (Scotland)

Jeffery, Laura. 2011. Chagos Islanders inMauritius and the UK. Forced displacementand onward migration. Manchester: Manch-ester University Press. 224 pp. Hb.: £65.ISBN 9780719084300.

The global system’s inherent contradictionsregularly generate constellations that provideentry points for anthropological researchabout those critical junctions that allow fordense and thick descriptions of historicalprocesses of exploitation, annihilation andtheir ideological foundations. One such con-stellation emerged in the Western IndianOcean when the inhabitants of the ChagosArchipelago were deported in the years be-tween 1965 and 1973 to make way for oneof the largest US military bases in the world.Three years prior to the independence of theBritish colony Mauritius, this archipelago wastransferred into a new administrative unit, theBritish Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Aspart of what has been identified by Vine (2009)as the ‘Strategic Islands Concept’ of the USCold War machine, the British governmentleased the central island of Diego Garcia to theUS government and rewarded the postcolonialMauritian government with a then substantialcompensation for its silence over the issue. At

the same time, the inhabitants of the formercopra plantation settlement were deported toMauritius and the Seychelles and left there tomake a new living. Neither Mauritius nor theSeychelles were particularly prosperous placesin those days and it took the deportees severaldecades before their protests against depor-tation, ensuing poverty and discrimination inthe receiving countries caught the attention ofa larger, global audience. Once these people,by now declaring themselves ‘Chagossians’,launched a series of high-profile court casesagainst the British and the US government inUK courts in the late 1990s, they also caughtthe attention of numerous anthropologists.

Laura Jeffery’s book under considerationhere is the second monograph to emergefrom such research. The book itself is highlyaccessible and manages well to break downthe complex entanglements of the Chagos-sians’ struggle within Mauritius and with theUK legal system. Those struggles resulted insome Chagossians migrating to the UK afterreceiving British passports, but did not grantothers the right to resettle on the Chagosislands. While significant parts of the six mainchapters are based on previously publishedworks, the book presents a significantly ex-tended and clearly written narrative. The in-troduction outlines the author’s main concernwith analysing the Chagossian story alongcategories such as displacement and forcedmigration. Chapters 1 and 2 give a historicalbackground on colonial settlement of theWestern Indian Ocean and how the changingglobal constellation in the post-1945 era notonly resulted in the Chagossians’ deportationbut also meant that their life and times inMauritius were shaped by the local manifes-tations of Cold War politics. Chapters 3 and4 then scrutinise how Chagossian narrativesof homeland and exile became stronger overthe decades and how the limited quality oflife prior to 1965 was increasingly portrayedas paradise in exile. This is then coupled with adiscussion of the politics of culture in exile, fo-cusing on the preservation of traditional dance,music and cooking, for example. Chapters 5and 6 turn to the fate of those Chagossians whohave migrated to the UK and mostly ended up


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living near and working at their place of entryto the UK, Gatwick Airport. Here the focusis no longer on the preservation of traditionsbut on outlining how onward migration haschanged the migrants’ views of Mauritius andhow this can be compared to their earlierand different displacement from Chagos toMauritius.

There are several points that will surelytrigger some discussion of Jeffery’s book.For one, the potential that the story of theChagossians offers lies fallow because thevolume is thin with regard to extent andsubstance. Manchester University Press claims224 pages for the book, but there are actuallyonly 155 pages for references, endnotes, blankpages between chapters and an index plus20 further pages with Latin pagination thatcontain no ethnography. This comes at a price.Although it is often evident that Jeffery hasgenerated an impressive body of data overseveral years of research, both ethnohistoricaland ethnographic foundations for most con-clusions drawn seem rather flimsy. This rangesfrom claims that life in Chagos is romanticisedin exile while there was actually a sexist andracist plantation extending into the interactionsof the islanders that are based on rather thinmaterials taken from the lyrics of songs forexample (pp. 62–7), to contradictory evidenceon the actual position of the Chagossians thatshifts from tracing their marginal position inMauritius up to the present in Chapter 1 toshowing how central their story is for Mauri-tian domestic and foreign affairs in Chapter 2.Furthermore, Jeffery takes little notice of theexisting body of literature on the Chagossiancase, ranging from several graduate thesessurely available to her (e.g. Johannessen 2005)to an excellent monograph (Vine 2009), whichaddress very similar examples but provide amore sophisticated theoretical reflection on thesubject.

ReferencesJohannessen, S. 2005. ‘Contested roots. The con-

temporary exile of the Chagossian com-munity’, MA thesis. Department of SocialAnthropology, University of Oslo.

Vine, D. 2009. Island of shame. The secret historyof the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

PATRICK NEVELINGUniversity of Bern (Switzerland)

Kousis, Maria, Tom Selwyn and DavidClark (eds.) 2011. Contested Mediterraneanspaces. Ethnographic essays in honourof Charles Tilly. New York and Oxford:Berghahn Books. 330 pp. Pb.: $120.00/£75.00. ISBN 978 0 85745 132 3.

Dealing with the Mediterranean as a meaning-ful framework for social and cultural analysis isnot an easy task. Beyond the self-evident truthof a cultural geography moulded by a long his-tory of interrelations and connections as wellas conflicts and separations, essentialist ideasof ‘Mediterranean-ness’ loom over the samehistorical complexities of the region. How-ever, over the last 10 years several attemptswere made to overcome the shortcomings ofan oversimplifying approach to the Mediter-ranean region. Although these attempts arenot always related to each other, they seem toexpress a common attitude toward the needof problematising the cultural geography ofan area which far from being homogeneous,has been and is involved in a set of political,economical and social processes marked bycleavages and conflicts. That is the case of thisedited volume, which provides a wide rangeof ethnographies concerned with ‘contestedspaces’ – from museums to urban planning,from environmentalism to the appropriationof religious sites and to musical festival –skilfully framed within a common set of prob-lems, perspectives and structural processes.Its aim as acknowledged in the introductionis to ‘locate the collection of essays withina framework of overlapping spaces’ and to‘express the dynamics of social structure andprocesses within these spaces in terms of rela-tionships between politics, capital and identity’(p. 1).


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The editors acknowledge the influenceof Charles Tilly, which orients the generalperspective of the book towards the controver-sial construction, appropriation and definitionof ‘space’ in (mainly) urban contexts. Tilly’sinfluence is likewise noticeable in the emphasison cities as fruitful viewpoints to explorethe connections between local, national andsupranational layers (p. 3). Most contributionssuggest that the analysis of social and polit-ical processes in Mediterranean cities wouldprovide a steppingstone to the understandingof the ways global economic and politicalprocesses intervene in the production of spacein small-scale sites.

The thirteen chapters that make up thebook are divided into four parts. Part 1,‘Recovering the Mediterranean’, contains threeessays on the problematical issues related tothe thickness of meanings that overlap intothe rhetoric of ‘Mediterranean-ness’, with ref-erence to the region’s relationship with the Eu-ropean Union. The opening chapter (VassilikiYakoumaki) provides a critical assessment ofthe EU-funded Med-Voices project – ‘Mediter-ranean Voices: Oral History and CulturalPractices in Mediterranean Cities’ – in whichseveral contributors to this volume took part.Reflecting on the mutual influence betweenscholars and institutions, Yakoumaki addressesthe problems of doing research within aframework established by EU cultural pol-itics, and the ‘bureaucratic essentialisms’ (p.18) researchers faced in the production ofpositive representations of the Mediterranean.The following two chapters devoted to Euro-pean ‘securitisation’ policies on the Southernfringe (Minas Samatas) and a music festivalgathering the different Mediterranean musicaltraditions (Eleni Kallimopoulou), focus on thecontroversial attitudes of the EU towards theMediterranean, marked by political and mili-tary practices of exclusion and contradictoryattempts of rhetorical inclusion on the groundof common ‘traditions’ and cultural features.

The essays in Part 2, ‘State, Capitaland Resistance’, bring us to another level ofcleavages, partly related to the larger polit-ical processes outlined in Part 1, the newEuro-Mediterranean policy. These processes

are articulated on different scales and con-ceptual layers: the city, State and civil societyrelationships, environmentalism, science andcommunity based activism. On a smaller scaleof analysis, that of the neighbourhood, Part 3,‘Capital, Neighborhood Governance’, ex-plores the relationships between local patternsof social action and political and institutionalframeworks and the ways these are influencedby the flows of global capital. Particularly chal-lenging issues are raised by a detailed ethnog-raphy of the gentrification process in the innercity of Palma de Mallorca (Spain), in whichthe overlapping of networks and discourseson the city brings about controversial parallelprocesses of urban re-qualification and socialexclusion (Marc Morell and Jaume Franquesa).The neighbourhood then reveals itself as bothan effect of top-down policies and a site ofconflict and exploitation – a contentious andcontested space. Finally, Part 4, ‘TransformingIdentities: Imagination and Representations’,focuses more directly on several case studiesconcerned with the production of culturaldifference and the conflictual appropriation ofspaces: Jewish museums in Italy (David Clark),a multi-religious neighbourhood in Granada(Javier Roson Lorente and Gunther Dietz), areligious site in Palestine (Tom Selwyn) anda festival in Greece (Elia Vardaki). In all ofthese cases the overlapping of different localpractices intermeshes with the complexitiesof geopolitical situations and socioeconomicprocesses on a larger scale (such as migrationflows, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict etc.).

One may notice that certain unifyingfeatures of the volume – a critical approach toEU cultural policy, its focus on global capitalflows, an attention to the conflictual dimensionof social processes etc.) are anything but new.None the less by insisting on contentious-ness and the unstable characters of identitiesand politics that are continuously reproducedwithin and across the region, the collectiontestifies to an innovative attitude, providingan insightful framework for the understandingof the Mediterranean as a complicated whole.In doing so the volume breaks away from thefixed circularity of stereotyped representationsof the Mediterranean, relocating it within the


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complexities and interconnectedness of globalprocesses.

ANTONIO MARIA PUSCEDDUUniversity of Cagliari (Italy)

Krause-Jensen, Jakob. 2010. Flexible firm:the design of culture at Bang & Olufsen. NewYork: Berghahn Books. 318 pp. Hb.: $85.00.ISBN 978-1-84545-668-9.

Purity, simplicity and exclusivity constitutethe design characteristics most often associatedwith Bang & Olufsen (B&O) – ‘one of thecrown jewels of the Danish manufacturingindustry’, as Krause-Jensen puts it. Quiteliterally in fact: the company is Purveyor tothe Royal Danish Court and a favourite ofher Majesty Queen Margrethe II, when for-eign dignitaries are bestowed with gifts. Onewould think that such a powerful and iconiccorporation would not need any branding. Notso! In 1999, when Krause-Jensen embarkedon his fieldwork at B&O, the CEO decidedto double the marketing budget to 100millDKR (€15mill). From the vantage point ofthe Human Resource Department (HRD), theanthropologist explores the translation of thisallocation into managerial visions of ‘corporateculture’ and how this discourse is distributed,received, experienced and reacted to by theemployees at various floors of the corporation.

The book falls in three parts: Section I setsout the methodology and theory; section IImines the corporate history and section IIIdetails the ethnography. The first two chaptersdeal with the challenges of conducting field-work among ‘radically reflexive and theorized’(p. 39) employees, who produce conceptualdescriptions drawing on academic culturalistdiscourse. This implies that the analytical mapof the anthropologist and the empirical terrainof his interlocutors at times conflate, whichleads to what Krause-Jensen dubs ‘fieldworkamong lay ethnographers’. Commuting be-tween his home in Silkeborg, his alma materin Aarhus and his field site in Struer, we areliterally in the backyard of the anthropologist.

The virtues of the home turf are the painstak-ing detail, precision, saturation, solidness andplasticity of the ethnography; the vices seemthat Krause-Jensen is never really pulled outof his homey comfort-zone, which makes hiscredo ‘strangeness does not start on the otherside of the ocean, but at the tip of the nose’(p. 168) less convincing.

The third chapter deals with the key ques-tion of how to conceptualise the relationshipbetween power and culture, or in this casebetween the discursive registers of manage-ment ideology and the agency of employeeswithin a single organisation. The contours oftwo competing conceptualisations of powerare delineated: Weber’s notion of the ‘ironcage’ of rationalisation and Foucault’s notionof the ‘panopticon’. Krause-Jensen resolves thecompetition by accommodating both theorists,arguing that B&O is in fact a ‘glass cage’,which enables effective surveillance that pro-duces certain forms of subjectivity and self-management through a corporate discourseof transparency and accountability. Withinthis framework he elucidates the paradox ofbeing a successful employee and at the sametime realising one’s subjectivity in a deeperexistential sense. By and large, Krause-Jensen’sadvances a Focaultian governmentality per-spective supplemented with a dash of Barthianagency.

The second section takes us through theshifting corporate discourses from 1925 to thelate 1990s in four chronological chapters. Thiscorporate history boils down to a couple of dis-cursive shifts in managerial discourse, the mostsignificant being from ‘product-driven’ over‘culture projects’ to ‘value-driven’. Stayingtrue to his theoretical marriage of Foucault andBarth, it is not all discursive fields. However,Krause-Jensen misses analytical opportunitiesfor a more sustained engagement with thesediscursive shifts, beyond the employee in-terpretation of ‘if anything is constant, it ischange’ (p. 78) and Sahlins’ structuralist mantraof ‘plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose’(p. 145). These shifts could have been produc-tively linked to the new knowledge produc-tion at leading business schools, transnationalmarket trends, the organisational visions of the


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‘cultural other’ (SONY), or corporate values ofthose closer to Scandinavian modernism suchas LEGO or IKEA.

The corporate history serves primarilyas the pre-history of Krause-Jensen’s field-work and sets the stage for his ethnogra-phy on the reception of the ‘fundamentalvalues’ of ‘excellence, poetry and synthesis’among the employees. In the course of 6months in 1999, he heads to the canteenduring lunch breaks, conducts interviews inProduct Development (PD), attends meetingsand observes and participates in the work-ings of the HRD. His ethnography picksup broad scepticism towards the ‘three dirtywords’ conceived to strengthen the ethos andcommon purpose of the organisation. Hefinds that ‘the abstract nature of the values’(p. 187) polarised and split the managementfrom the staff, as well as the HRD from thePD. The ethnography in section III revealstwo paradoxical relationships between flexi-bility vis-a-vis experience and formalisation.Firstly, contrary to the widely held assumptionthat younger employees thrive in informalnetwork-organisational structures and seniorsfail, it was the experienced engineers, withoutexception, who preferred the new flexible or-ganisation to the older departmental divisions(p. 262). Secondly, flexibility did not reduceformalism, bureaucracy and regulations; rather‘a certain kind of bureaucracy seemed to bean unavoidable consequence of the flexiblestrategy itself’ (p. 271).

The book stands out and is likely tobecome a touchstone monograph in the emerg-ing field of the Anthropology of Business &Organization. However, the work is severelyhampered by what Van Maanen in the Fore-word defines as ‘a kind of theoretical cocktailto which the author himself testifies: “I amshamelessly eclectic”’ (p. 20). We are invited tomake sense of an organisational micro-cosmosthrough an analytical tour-de-force with shift-ing theoretical guides for each chapter and toomany nods to disparate bodies of theory ateach page. The analytical repertoire is sweepingand the readings of the different theories arewell articulated, but it all adds up to a seriesof lesser attempts to unpack and elucidate

the conceptual triangulation of culture-power-agency – less would indeed have been more.However, this theoretical kaleidoscope repre-sents the author’s genuine attempt to come toterms with and understand his material over adecade of writing. The problem is that it readsas a piecemeal puzzle, rather than a crafted andcompelling argument, where the theoreticalpurchase of different concepts is juxtaposed,challenged and really put at stake.

That being said, the book has a powerfuland enticing storyline: the struggle for the ‘truesoul’ of B&O, between the ‘sincerity’ of thePD and the ‘artificiality’ of the HRD, betweenminimalist Scandinavian modernism embed-ded in Jutlandian modesty and the aggressiveand high-flying rhetoric of brand gurus frommetropolises. This tale is well told, pitched asan ‘I-witnessing/they-picturing’ story of beingthere. But there are limitations to such anaccount, which stays so close to the actionsand metaphors on the ground in North-westJutland. Larger questions beyond the micro-cosmos of B&O are left out: To what extentdoes the flexible organisational culture of B&Oreflect the official Danish labour market model‘flex-security’? To what extent does globalisedmarket capitalism shape the ‘corporate culture’of B&O, rather than the host of local CEOsand brand gurus we meet? Such questions arepertinent, but not posed, simply because theyseem out of reach for the type of ethnographyKrause-Jensen seems committed to.

MARTIN SKRYDSTRUPUniversity of Nairobi (Kenya)

Lambek, Michael. 2010. Ordinary ethics:anthropology, language, and action. NewYork: Fordham University Press. 400 pp. Pb.$30.00. ISBN 9780823233175.

This edited volume constitutes a remarkablystrong incentive to abandon power and struc-tures in favour of ethics for explaining socialreality: ethics as a dimension of all humanactions, ‘a property of speech and action, asmind is a property of body’ (p. 61). The book is


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a demonstration, chapter by chapter, that ethicsis part of the human condition, present in everysocial and human experience, from ordinarytalk to cosmologies. The volume includes 20contributions, mostly from anthropologists,and covers a geographically wide range of casestudies that lead us from Asia to Australiaor Amazonia, passing through London or theAbu Ghraib prison.

The location of ethics between the spokenand the unspoken, between objectification andembodiment, its attention to reveal the tacitand the implicit as well as its sensibility tothe difference between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, are thestrength of ‘ordinary ethics’ – as, in addition tothe fulfilled promise that is the book, ordinaryethics positions itself as a research programmefor the future: ‘We locate the ethical in the con-junction or movement between explicit localpronouncements and implicit local practices’(p. 7). The book shows that the anthropologyof moralities – or ethics – could not be reducedto an ethno-ethics, a comparative ethnographyof explicitly asserted moral frames. Althoughnot all chapters depart definitely from thisethnological approach, their putting togetherand the variety of aspects covered helps makethe important point that ethical sensibilitiesshould be looked for beneath every action.And, if this claim was also that of Durkheim(with the entailing risk that the ethical dilutesinto the social), here the implication drawn isdifferent: if every social fact could be morallycharged (sometimes neuter), this does notderive directly from the equation society =moral commitment, but should be analysedand proved in all its complex intertwinementbetween ‘ought’ and ‘is’ present in everyaspect of human life. One cannot but notethat this position is different from recentresearch on moralities that place themselvesas anti-Durkheimian by stressing the singu-larity of moral reasoning and constituting itas a subject on its own that would corre-spond to a distinguishable part of the socialrealm.

Without being programmatic, normativeor embracing the new forms of global mili-tantism, the editor Michael Lambek highlightsthe contemporary relevance of ethical ques-

tions: ‘one of the questions implicitly raised iswhether and how ordinary ethical sensibilitiesare coarsened or heightened with respect tobroad social forces such as consumer capi-talism, media advertising, inequality, violence,and specific forms of discipline, such as boot-camp army training’ (p. 3). Furthermore thevolume tries to avoid the relativist/universalistdebates involved in cross-cultural moral judge-ments (notably in human rights debates). Theeditor asserts that taking ethics to be a propertyrather than an object (an Aristotelian instead ofa Kantian definition) should prevent the con-tributors from explaining ethics in rationalist,utilitarianist, biological or other deterministicterms. Getting away from normative judge-ments, not being reductionist in explanationsand circumventing the relativist/universalistdebate is a very stimulating agenda that onecould not but support. Though some ques-tions arise. Firstly, whether the wish to re-main innocent of the normative implicationsof an ethnographic analysis could be sus-tained and, secondly, if evacuating rationalistterms of explanation will not totally blindus to scientific facts. I will illustrate thesequestions with just one example from thebook.

The focus on ordinary action versus ex-traordinary, deviant phenomenon alleviates theproblem of the neutrality of the observer byreducing the weight of the issues at stake. Butcould this position be maintained when study-ing prison abuses conducted by Americansoldiers in Iraq (the chapter by Steven Caton)?Here Caton positions himself in favour ofa study in terms of situational evil ratherthan in terms of transcendental values; hisarguments are subtle and convincing and wellmaintain his neutrality. But what would havehappened if his description were intended toinform the normative, facing the pragmaticneed to evaluate, judge, make a decision? In hiscritique of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice(2009), the philosopher Wilfried Hinsch (2011)argues that without an (transcendental) ideaof the good, there is no way to judge what isbetter or worse and advance towards the good.When the ethical is just a property of things,based and transmitted through the experience


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of the past, how do we know what is moreethical, in the absence of a socially (sometimesglobally) constructed idea of ethical thinking?And, finally, shall we abandon rationalist,biological etc. criteria as being too reductionistinstead of maintaining them as the backboneof judgement, to which experience, emotions,contingencies should be added in order todescribe human complexity?

Linguistic anthropology inspires manycontributors to the volume and refines theirinteractionist and dynamic approach. The eth-ical action (including the act of speech) is madethrough human interactions and is analysedthrough their observation, with a careful atten-tion given to details, nuances, micro-changes,levels of meta-thinking. Divided in sevenparts, the volume tackles agency, responsibil-ity, etiquette and aesthetics, punishment anddignity, in ordinary and extraordinary actions.It brings with it a refinement of terms andexemplary analyses of contextual situationsthat should remain inspiring for general socialanthropology.

ReferencesHinsch, W. 2011. ‘Ideal justice and rational dis-

sent’, Analyse & Kritik 02/2011: 371–86.Sen, A. 2009. The idea of justice. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

MONICA HEINTZUniversite Paris X, Nanterre (France)

Lindhardt, Martin (ed.) 2011. Practicingthe faith. The ritual life of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians. New York andOxford: Berghahn. 336 pp. Hb: $95.00/£55.00. ISBN 978-1-84545-770-9.

This fine volume addresses the apparent oxy-moron of Pentecostal-Charismatic ritual –what Joel Robbins refers to in his contributionas one of its ‘obvious aspects’: not essences,meanings or contents of beliefs or doctrines,

but the outward, observable things peopleare actually doing as participants in religiousactivity (and what it does to them). Thisperspective on the various permutations ofcharismatic Christianity has been taken byonly a few studies, which serve as the mainbody of literature to which nearly all the essaysassembled here refer (most notably, the workof Thomas Csordas, Tanya Luhrmann andSimon Coleman). Martin Lindhardt suggestsin his introduction that ritual practices canprovide a new lens through which to lookat most of the central issues that research onglobal Christianity focuses on: how Charis-matics construct the social reality of God’spresence, as well as the Devil’s; how theybuild a community; what is behind their useof popular culture and mass media; how andwhy their spiritualisation of the quotidianis realised; and not least, why this form ofreligious practice is so successful all over theworld. Though it cannot be claimed that thisvolume provides exhaustive answers to all ofthese questions, by promoting a focus on ritualpractice it does a very good job at illuminatingat least a few, and brings a much-needed micro-level approach to all of them.

The cohesion of the chapters is pro-vided not only by the consensus amongthe authors that these self-proclaimed anti-ritualists are indeed engaging in ritualisedbehaviours, but also by the fact that allthe papers emerge from research done withqualitative, ethnographic methods (all theauthors are anthropologists or sociologistsby profession, with the exception of onetheologian). The definition of ‘Pentecostal-Charismatic’ in the title, on the other hand, isquite broad; the chapters cover a wide rangeof charismatic ‘types’ of Christianity, fromCatholics and Evangelicals who have adoptedcharismatic practices, to prosperity- or faith-gospel Christians, to neo-Pentecostalism ingeneral. The geographic range of empiricaldata is also broad: four chapters are locatedin North America, two in South America,one each in Sweden, South Korea, Fiji, andKenya. The practices that are examined in-clude prayer, sermons, testimonies, deliverance


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(exorcism), healing, being ‘slain’ in the Spirit,the Toronto Blessing, speaking in tongues,singing hymns, dancing and shouting; thecontexts in which they are observed includecell group meetings, regular church servicesand revival meetings.

Contributions by Csordas and MartynPercy focus on charismatic groups in declineand the concomitant crisis in ritual behaviours.Lindhardt, Jacqueline Ryle, Kelly Chong andGretchen Pfeil provide ethnographically richdescriptions of the highly embodied andemotional practices of charismatic Christians,whereas Paul Gifford and Simon Colemanfocus more on linguistic aspects of worship.Jon Bialecki reminds us that, although thebody and language have been dominant re-search paradigms in recent work, even amongexperience-oriented Christians, the ideationalplane of divine cosmologies can also helpexplain ritual behaviour, such as the quietlymurmured, subtle prayers of deliverance fromdemons he examines. The fact that this per-spective is in the minority in this collectionsays something about its overall theoreticalorientation: Talal Asad is more prominent thanClifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu more thanVictor Turner. The first and last chapters, byRobbins and David Smilde, respectively, drawon Randall Collins’ work on ‘interaction ritualchains’, again emphasising the importance ofbodily copresence and emotions in explaininghow and why rituals work. Robbins’ essay onthe link between ritual activity and the globalsuccess of charismatic Christianity presentsa compelling argument that is well placedat the beginning of the book: rather thanreproducing another version of the narrativethat Pentecostalism compensates for lossesexperienced in the course of modernisation,Robbins claims that it is successful becauseit has produced transportable rituals that areeasily appropriated in local settings and cantherefore effectively offer emotional energyor Durkheimian effervescence in exchange forthe membership that is the source of insti-tutional stability. For this reason, he argues,understanding Pentecostal ritual is essentialto understanding its success, a most welcomechange of perspective that will hopefully spark

interest in producing many more studies of thekind assembled here.

MONIQUE SCHEERUniversity of Tubingen (Germany)

Mayer, Danila. 2011. Park youth in Vienna.A contribution to urban anthropology. Wien,Berlin: Lit Verlag. 216 pp. Pb: €29. ISBN978-3-643-50253-7.

This publication is an ethnography of youthand adolescents who have claimed their spacesin the parks of Vienna. In the first part of thebook the author gives an overview of classicaland recent studies of anthropological youthresearch as well as urban studies and showstheir relevance for her field. The second partof the book is the result of several years ofresearch, applied approaches and participantobservation of youth groups in public spaces inVienna. Danila Mayer is a social anthropologistwho has worked for several years as a youthworker and has conducted a lot of research,for example, on internet use and on healthawareness of adolescents. Above all, her accessand positioning in the field for several years,her experiences of streetwork (social work inpublic spaces) and in crisis intervention en-abled her to offer amazing insights. Long-termparticipant observation, applied approaches, atrusted position for conducting interviews andthe opportunity to reflect on the dynamics ofchange in youth culture over the years, makethis study an extraordinary documentation ofyouth in Vienna.

Most of the youth she is working with inViennese parks have a poor economic standingand face social exclusion and marginalisation inmany ways. Several of the youth families havemigrant background, belong to the property-less urban population and are excluded fromsocial upward mobility. Due to the schoolingsystem in Austria, which the author brieflyoutlines (p.72f.), where young people are sep-arated at the very early age of 10 into differenttracks and where compulsory schooling endsat the age of 15, the young boys and girls in


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the study face problems in finding an adequateapprenticeship or education. The jobs theyobtain are often ‘strenuous, low-income, andlack social security’, and ‘standing in the park’(p. 165) between two precarious jobs is thereality for several of them. In the government-funded training they are often confronted onlywith pseudo-options. Many of them but notall of the park visitors are socially marginalised(p. 83).

The main foci of the study are the pro-cesses of group formation, networking andhow the adolescents gain access to the openspace. Mayer divides them between ‘open’groups, which are more fluid, interested in in-tegrating with others, and comprise a variety ofviews (e.g. gender, language, religion, national-ity, politics) and ‘closed’ groups, which form a‘rigid circle with their members [that] tend tosectarianism (. . .) often drawing on perceivedethnicity, nationalism, and religion’ (p. 92). Thespatial division and the gender-related usageof the parks are highlighted. Relevant bodystyles and consumer-based lifestyles are oftenmarkers for the identity of the youth.

Mayer’s process-oriented approach givesinsights into the fusion and fission as wellas the large group formation and long-termrelationships of group members, even if someof the former members are now adults andparents. An exploration of fashions and bodystyles shows interesting outlines of life styleand modes of consumption. Fascinating arethe insights into the youth culture concerningglobal music styles and the rapid changes infavourite dance styles. For some of the parkkids, performing music and dancing is a wayof gaining success and is an option in theunpromising labour market. For those withmigratory backgrounds, their relation to thehome country of their parents is contested andremigration not really an option.

Mayer follows the young people to youthcentres, neighbourhood cafes, shopping malls,discos, internet cafes and participatory com-munity television institutions, and shows howyouth workers are companions for their social-isation in parks and urban spaces. The insightinto the youths’ own perspectives is disturbing:faced with stigmatisation from their schooling

and fractured ‘careers’, they are now pushedto the margins of society without the requiredsocial and cultural capital, being forced to showtheir ‘mobility’ and ‘flexibility’. These outlinesare grounded in a thick description of howsocial exclusion is practised in Vienna.

Several photos depicting the ‘world’ andurban spaces of the youth give a vivid imageof the youth culture, their music and outdooractivities in the parks. More description onthe photos’ captions would have providedfurther insights. All in all, this publicationis a very impressive anthropological study ofyouth socialisation in public neighbourhoodparks in Vienna.

MARIA SIX-HOHENBALKENInstitute of Social Anthropology, AustrianAcademy of Sciences (Austria)

Moffat, Tina and Tracy Prowse (eds.) 2010.Human diet and nutrition in biocultural per-spective: past meets present. New Yorkand Oxford: Berghahn Books. 282 pp. Hb.:$95/£55. ISBN 9781845457655.

This edited volume starts with the premise thatalthough food is fundamental to humankind,the academic fields addressing food, diet andnutrition have worked in silos to the detrimentof each other. It takes a biocultural approach tothe subject matter, examining human diet andnutrition from prehistoric to contemporarysociety. The book has three strong points.Firstly, its comprehensive timespan allows oneto draw conclusions on how humanity’s pastaffects diet and nutrition today. Secondly, itbrings together the whole range of methodsand approaches utilised by anthropologists;in this sense, it serves as a nice reminderof the diversity of the discipline and as a‘mini-refresher course’ on archaeology andbiological anthropology for social and culturalanthropologists.

The book’s third strong point is itscase-study approach. Rather than giving abroad overview of human nutrition, mostchapters are grounded in specific spatial and


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time-bound settings. This allows for interest-ing in-depth analysis, rather than trite andsweeping statements about ‘change in humandiets across the ages’ too often found inthe literature. The first set of chapters takesan evolutionary approach, focusing on dietand brain evolution, child growth in forag-ing societies and finally providing prehistoricand evolutionary-based insights on infant andyoung child nutrition. This feeds into the sec-ond set of chapters on breastfeeding. Next aretwo chapters on children and food insecurityin the developing world, including accountsof urbanisation and the nutrition transition inNepal and responses to a food crisis in Niger.The book then concludes by addressing nutri-tional factors in growth and disease. The firstcase here comes from Imperial Rome and looksat childhood growth. The second is a broadexamination of bone density from a bioarche-ological perspective and the third an overviewof current obesity trends in North America.

The volume is certainly an interestingread with broad appeal. However, it does fallshort of its overall goals. In the introduction,the editors state that ‘throughout history hu-man nutrition has been shaped by political-economic and cultural forces, and in turn foodand nutrition can alter the course and directionof human societies’ (p. 1). However, with theexception of the chapters on breastfeeding inGibraltar and on food security in Niger, thepolitical and economic aspects of diet andnutrition are barely addressed in the book.The book also suffers from timeliness: it waswritten in 2010 and already some of theassertions and statements about obesity areout-of-date with current research, namely thechapters by Leonard et al. and by Katzmarzyk.The latter specifically adds nothing new tothe field. I also find it odd that a bookwhere breastfeeding appears as a commontheme to nearly all chapters and constitutesthe main focus of three contributions makesno mention of the UNICEF/WHO Codeof Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes andonly barely touches upon marketing as acontributing factor to breastfeeding rates. It isalso unclear as to who its audience is. AlthoughI think that social and cultural anthropologists

would benefit by reading such a book, theyalso may find the ‘technical’ aspects of theheavily bioarcheological chapters off-putting,as well as the relatively superficial treatment ofculture.

Due to the diversity of contributions thebook may seem unorganised at times, butoverall, I think this works in its favour. Thisbroad appeal means that anthropologists inone sub-field may read something they wouldnot otherwise – and this cross-subdisciplinarythinking is precisely what the editors intended.This makes it a nice contribution to a syllabusfor undergraduate or graduate courses in nutri-tional biology or anthropology, bioarcheologyor medical anthropology, rather than a special-ist audience.

RACHEL ELIZABETH IRWINStockholm International Peace ResearchInstitute (Sweden)

Pfaff-Czarnecka Joanna and Gerard Toffin.2011. The politics of belonging in theHimalayas. Local attachments and boundarydynamics. New Delhi: Sage. 380 pp. Hb.:£45.00. ISBN 978-81-321-0524-4.

Contemporary anthropologists are striving tomake sense of a world increasingly realised asbeing far more complex, esoteric and blurredthan was thought of earlier. The neat geo-political boundaries of the nation-states, mostof which came into existence in the post-colonial era, have also posed challenges to theway identities of any kind could be defined(necessity driven by an inherent pre-conditionof anthropological work to locate analysis inidentifiable entities). The very confinement ofthe concept of citizenship has brought aboutcontestations, protests and claims to beingsomething or not being something since, aspointed out in this volume, belonging is equallydefined by the fact of not belonging. Sincepost-modern anthropology is taking recourseto methodological concepts that have poten-tial for manipulation and flexibility, an emo-tional and subjective concept like belongingseems more appropriate than a more formal


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concept like identity. Belonging also containsthe notion of performativity and has an implicitreference to process rather than structure.

The Himalayan region has invited im-mense intellectual investment from a widerange of scholars because of its unique geo-political, multicultural and environmental vari-ations and historicity that give ample scopefor ethnographic studies and a fertile groundfor testing various concepts. We see in thisvolume a wide range of ethnographic situa-tions from national parks to small town courtrooms, from social and religious movements topolitical protests, economic strategies, kinshipand rituals, all discussed under the commonframework of belongingness. In this sensebelonging emerges as a concept of possibilitiesand an ontological status that relates probablybetter to actual situations than the earlierconcept of identity.

The volume relates belonging to threebroad parameters: territory and indigeneity;socio-religious bonding; and commitmentsand conflicts. However, we find that ethno-graphically none are exclusive, as indigeneityfor example is clearly routed through ritual orreligious bonding and practices of exclusion,and may express itself in conflict, while terri-toriality may influence kinship commitmentseven it does not define them. A positive featureof this volume is that it has spread itselfover the cultural diversity of the Himalayanregion, including ethnographies from Nepal,Uttrakhand, Himachal, North-east India, andcovers even the reformulation of mountainidentities in the plains, like citizenship andbelongingness of the Nepalis in Benaras.

The theoretical issues that are most high-lighted dissociate ethnicity from essentialistcriteria like kinship and territory, shifting in-stead towards concepts of movement, emplace-ment and performance. The role of ‘Others’ ininfluencing belonging are also discussed, forexample, in two complementary papers aboutmutual belongingness of temples and devo-tees, evoking both higher order nationalismand individual-level devotion. Belongingnessis thus contextualised within larger politicaland cultural milieus, where both existing andemerging conditions can play significant roles

in how people negotiate identities, not onlytheir own but their village, community andclan identity – as we find in ethnographiesof Maoist movements in a Nepal village, theconstructed identities of the Naga and of thestate of Uttarakhand in India.

The Himalayan region provides interest-ing examples of how religion is constructedand understood by actors, as this region hashistorically been under the influence of Hin-duism, Buddhism and local cosmologies thathave incorporated and also influenced the greattraditions. The engagement of devotees to thesacred world as well as the manner in whichreligion can be linked to issues of belong-ingness, evoking natural and cultural ties, arethe subject of several contributions. Emergingissues like environmentalism have also enteredinto debates and definitions of belonging aspapers on national parks indicate. In both Indiaand Nepal, issues of legitimacy of citizenshiphave been linked to the willingness to engageresponsibly with the environment. However,the question of who has the right to define themargins of responsibility may reflect politicalhierarchy, rather than real engagement. Thevolume brings to light issues of marginalityand the role of existing and changing politicalhierarchies in over determining the legitimacyof belonging. It also highlights movements andcontestations against such impositions.

This is a richly documented volume thatis set in the contemporary social and politicalrealities of the Himalayan frontiers. A questionsadly left out is the issue of Tibetans’ belonging,although Tibet formed a fulcrum for much ofthe cultural and political development of thisregion.

SUBHADRA MITRA CHANNAUniversity of Delhi (India)

Postill, John. 2011. Localizing the Inter-net: an anthropological account. New York:Berghahn Books. 180 pp. Hb.: $40.00/£23.00. ISBN 978-0-85745-197-2.

Postill’s account of internet activism in asuburb of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is sobering


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reading for anyone who might imagine thatsuch things herald a new dawn for open and fairdemocracy. Beginning with an ambitious infor-mation technology project called Subang Jaya2005 (SJ2005), Postill offers an entertaining andinsightful ethnographic account of key localplayers and a theoretical roadmap for carryingout something approaching an anthropologyof internet-related practices. Postill eschewsthe concepts of community and networks formaking sense of the internet activists withwhom he worked. Both concepts, he suggests,misrepresent important aspects of events onthe ground (or the internet). Instead, he sug-gests that studying internet-related activitiesrequires greater precision across space andtime. In particular, he invokes a ‘field ofresidential affairs’ as a way of identifyingactivities carried out by a diverse cluster ofpeople who cannot accurately be categorisedas a local community or a network. Thisslightly unwieldy term is used to denote adomain of ‘practical endeavour and strugglein which local agents (activists, politicians,councillors, journalists and others) competeand cooperate over matters of concern to localresidents’ (p. 115). This enabled Postill to dealmore meaningfully with the role of internettechnologies and communication in practicesimpacting on local matters.

Malaysia, like some neighbouring coun-tries in the region, has invested heavily ininformation technologies designed to stimu-late economic growth as well as enhance thecapacity of governments to both control andrespond to the demands of their populations.The experimental initiative that Postill ob-served in action was designed to act as a testcase for the rest of Malaysia. It began withan ambitious set of targets that included high-speed, affordable internet access to all, as wellas responsive websites that would accuratelyreflect public opinion and help the municipalcouncil channel resources where they weremost needed. Postill’s ethnographic accountsuggests that information technologies, likeevery other technology, get implemented inways that are not independent of local so-cial and cultural contexts. The disappointingoutcome of SJ2005 suggests that, while there

are clearly some successes, the net resulthas not been a radical rollout of affordable,high-speed internet access leading to smooth-running large-scale democratic e-governance.Instead, Postill describes a familiar tale of com-peting interests at different levels (grassroots,municipal, regional and national), which setthe scene for a dissipation of the efforts thatmight have led to more effective e-government.Postill is careful to point out that SJ2005 isnot exactly a failure either, but several of thesuccesses he cites fall into a category that helabels ‘banal activism’. Such banal activism hasbrought about changes to local taxes, wastecollection, traffic congestion, school provisionor local crime, but, as Postill acknowledges,are not the revolutionary change desired bythe anti-globalisation activists in Barcelona(pp. 56–7). It matters to those implicatedwithin the field of residential affairs, however,and Postill needn’t remind anthropologists thatit is not our job to dismiss what matters to thepeople with whom we work (even though theyoften don’t agree on what those things mightbe!).

There is little to disagree with or criticisein Postill’s account. He provides an articu-late ethnographic account of internet-relatedactivities in a suburb of Malaysia. The booklays out a model of dealing with internet-mediated communication in complex socialsettings. As such, it offers something of anexemplar for what must surely be an increas-ingly common situation for anthropologists.Those of us who carried out village studiesbefore the information technology explosionof the past 15 years have watched, amazed, aspeople start to weave internet communicationsinto the complex tapestry of political andeconomic activities that shape their fields ofaffairs, be they residential or otherwise. Iwould, however, perhaps not dispense withthe idea of formal networks as Postill does,though he clearly does not do so lightly ordismissively. While he has done an excellentjob of describing the scene and theorising theinternet and its related activities, I wonder ifan additional layer of analysis might fruitfullybe generated by a formal network analysis ofthe various transactions that are observable


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and made concrete by those local practitioners.I would not suggest replacing any part of thebook, but I might have enjoyed an additionalchapter dealing with formal social networks inprecisely the ways that Postill says might limitor blinker the view of ‘actual internet practices’(pp. 14–15).

STEPHEN M. LYONDurham University (United Kingdom)

Rao, Ursula. 2010. News as culture. Journal-istic practices and the remaking of Indianleadership traditions. New York and Oxford:Berghahn Books. 240 pp. Hb. $80.00/£47.00. ISBN 978-1-84545-669-6.

India’s news press landscape has a long history,reaching back to the late 18th century, and be-ing closely tied to the process of nation-makingas well as the emergence of politicised and con-troversial public spheres, or ‘split publics’ (Ra-jagopal 2001). In this fascinating monograph,anthropologist Ursula Rao presents a detailedand analytically sharp exploration of the fieldof news production as it spreads across regionaland national discourses and networks. With aparticular focus on the situation since the turnof the new millennium, Rao’s ethnographycovers insightful case studies of individualnewspapers and press events, the routine ofjournalistic work in specific urban localitiesand political as well as commercial networksacross the nation, and the different agendas andagents underlining the highly strategic practiceof news making. In four chapters, Rao takesthe reader into the microcosm of the newspress that, as she argues, is a form of culturalproduction.

The first chapter begins with the vernac-ular press in Lucknow, the capital of the northIndian state of Uttar Pradesh. The author hasaccompanied local reporters to study how theynavigate in a field of discourses in order toimprove their position vis-a-vis local politicalleaders or to communicate citizens’ interests inthe urban milieu. A dynamic milieu of workroutines, status aspirations and organisational

hierarchies is carefully unfolded in which Rao,among other issues, highlights the differencein hierarchies between Hindi and English lan-guage newspapers, the first one being knittedalong the lines of seniority and privilege, thelatter apparently being based on the ideal of‘flat’ hierarchies and on-going competition.Both work cultures respond to market liberali-sation’s pressure to ‘perform’ and compete, butwhile the vernacular Hindi paper seems morerooted in local issues, the English-languagenewspapers represent an elitist perspective,according to Rao. While this chapter suggests afairly clear line that divides the two, one mightwonder whether the borders are not moreoscillating. In fact, this is what Rao proposesin the next chapter when she explores how thediversification of the news print market witheconomic liberalisation pushes the boundariesof elite and vernacular spheres.

The third chapter investigates the makingof political news, and the ‘cultivation’ ofnetworks and contacts to keep them well-oiled in order to allow for efficient access,if need arises. Rao traces the manifold waysin which state journalists strategically investin relations to the political class, and ticklesout the social dynamics and tensions that lieunderneath the ‘printed surface’. The chap-ter allows for stunning discussions of moralregimes negotiated between notions of ‘hotnews’, political righteousness and professionalethics. Pinpointing well-selected controversiesaround public interest and sentiment, as well ascharismatic leadership, Rao provides the readerwith a complex field of different agendas andagents contesting – and requesting – powerover media representation and presence inthe field of public attention. Most of all, sheargues, journalists must be seen as producersof social relations, as brokers of politicalpower and public interests, well aware of theirambivalent position in terms of searching forand providing news.

In yet another chapter, the author tracesthe nodal points of linkage between journalistsand politicians on the national level. Whatopens up is a ‘play’ with different conceptsof power, entangling the two groups in re-ciprocal relationships of kinds, with the hope


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of strong and ‘suitable’ representation. Theethnographic detail of this chapter opens intothe performances tailored towards such pur-poses. This includes the staging of press confer-ences and politicians’ attempts to capture thepress’ attention and favour. This focus bridgesacross to the last chapter that investigates therole of highly commercial private undertakingsin the shaping of news cultures. Studyingstrategies of infotainment, argues Rao, bringsforward the growing financial dependenceof newspapers to privatised infrastructuresof newsmaking. These are accompanied byincreased pressure on newspapers to performalong the lines of the English-dominated andurbanised middle classes. This pressure spillsinto political performance according to ‘enter-taining’ news aesthetics. Sahara, a pan-Indianindustrial conglomerate from Lucknow, is theideal case study to elaborate on this. Yet Raoalso strengthens the point that commercialisa-tion and critical reporting do not necessarilyexclude each other, even though there seemsto be an underlining weakening of criticaland subversive potential in the news printindustry.

Each chapter in this monograph elucidatesthe rich ethnographic data in the context of avariety of theoretical discussions, ranging fromanthropology to media studies, thus makingit relevant for readers with a non-regionalinterest. Rao’s work responds well to ArvindRajagopal’s edited volume The Indian PublicSphere (2009). This is definitely a remarkableethnography about more than ‘just’ newspaperpolitics in North India, and a worthwhileread for scholars and students interested inurbanised middle-class discourses, media prac-tice in a variety of local settings in contempo-rary India.

ReferencesRajagopal, A. 2001. Politics after television: re-

ligious nationalism and the reshaping ofthe Indian public. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Rajagopal, A. (ed.) 2009. The Indian public sphere:structure and transformation. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

CHRISTIANE BROSIUSUniversity of Heidelberg (Germany)

S, aul, Mahir and Ralph A. Austen (eds.)2010. Viewing African cinema in the twenty-first century: art films and the Nollywoodvideo revolution. Athens, OH: Ohio Univer-sity Press. 248 pp. Pb.: $26.95. ISBN9780821419311.

Viewing African Cinema is poised on the cuspof the millennium, looking back to reassess theinitial decades of African cinema while layingout new directions for future study. The vol-ume seeks to bring disparate discourses and do-mains of analysis into connection, bridging thedivide between art house or auteurist Africanfilm and more popular video works from Nol-lywood and beyond. The text also attempts tomove beyond established oppositions betweenhumanists and social scientists, film aestheticsand social analysis, production and reception,and Francophone and Anglophone spheres;most of the essays challenge these conventions,opening up new possibilities for analysis.

The initial section on Nollywood offersboth critical reassessments and fresh agendas.Jonathan Haynes argues that film studies canbring a new seriousness to Nollywood, in-cluding archival collection and preservationof video, auteurist analyses of directors, andattention to genre. Whether this really repre-sents the best way forward remains an openquestion; jettisoning interdisciplinary ethno-graphic and cultural studies approaches formore canonical film studies treatments wouldhardly constitute an improvement. OnookomeOkome articulates the postcolonial anxietiesunderlying resistance to the Nollywood phe-nomenon. Within the universities and criticalcircles, elite cultural mediators seek to presenta certain face of Nigeria to the world and rejectpopular video as sensationalist, reactionary orembarrassing: misleading the masses or mis-representing Africa. But as Okome cogentlyshows, while Nollywood doesn’t conform tocultural nationalist or Pan-Africanist agendasof what the people ‘should’ like, video certainlyengages the politics of the present, local–global


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processes and urban conditions in ways that aredeeply meaningful to a very large public withinNigeria and beyond. Ignoring or denigratingthese trends serves little purpose.

Stark oppositions between art film andvideo are consistently undermined in the es-says. Echoing some of Okome’s themes, BirgitMeyers argues that Ghanaian video was shapednot in competition with FESPACO art cinema,but rather in the face of competing discoursesfrom the state and the national film industry.Even as their power and productivity weredeclining, bureaucrats and industry insidersstill sought to determine what could and couldnot be shown on screen – arguing that filmmust have an uplifting or educational aim,even as video was taking over a privatisedand commercialised public sphere. In thiscontested domain, where issues of market andmorality, aesthetics and authority are verymuch at stake, Meyers never seeks to simplycelebrate the popular; instead, she historicisesand contextualises the rise of video, arguingagainst critiques ‘grounded in a paternalistic, ifnot colonial, idea of cinema as a medium foreducation and enlightenment’ (p. 57).

Nollywood, of course, is shorthand fora complex transnational phenomenon, andthe volume treats its diverse manifestationsin different sites, starting with Abdulla UbaAdamu’s rich discussion of Hausa videos,moral narratives, gender and the public/privatedialectics of social space. The collection alsoopens up new ground by following Nigerianvideo to East Africa, as Matthias Krings traces acrucial moment of emergence, as West Africanvideo imports gave way to a vigorous home-grown industry in Dar es Salaam known asBongowood (he also explores diverse mediapractices of translation such as video dubbingand the photo-novel). Krings’s piece is one ofa trio of works on Tanzania that can be read inconjunction. In keeping with the volume’s title,Laura Fair foregrounds issues of reception,beautifully exploring the (nostalgic?) memo-ries of Tanzanian cinema-goers from the 1950son, foregrounding the pleasures they derivedfrom Hindi film: emotional investments withthe struggles of downtrodden heroes, keeninterest in the performance of dance and

popular music, and a delight in spectacularentertainments. Bryce’s piece, on the otherhand, is rather more limited, discussing justtwo films as examples of a Tanzanian filmindustry that never came into existence. Muchof her discussion pertains to a narrow windowof time in the 1990s and has been largelyoutpaced by more recent developments inBongo video and the film festival circuit.

Historical analysis and critical re-evaluation figure prominently in several otheressays. Mahir S, aul rethinks the critical or-thodoxy on Francophone African cinema,rejecting its narrow categorisation as neces-sarily ‘political’ and didactic in intent. As heshows, early African cinema was far morediverse than it has been labelled, as directorssought (but often failed to win) a popularaudience and commercial success, often limitedby constraining regional markets. Similarlychallenging boundaries between ‘politics’ and‘commerce’, Stefan Sereda places FESPACOfilm and Igbo videos in a common analyticframe, examining how strategies of ‘cautionarypedagogy’ operate in different registers. And,at the end, Lindsey Green-Simms offers alovely take on cultural technologies of moder-nity and mobility, linking the evolution ofmotion pictures and the motor car in WestAfrica – as vehicles of images and subjects ofthem from Sembene to Nnebue.

All the essays are not equally successful.Peter Rist’s case for the statistical analysis offilm shot-length fails to convince, producingresults that hardly seem worth the effort.And while there is an interesting piece onthe history of California Newsreel, this pointsto a larger problem: certainly a volume onAfrican spectatorship should include a muchbroader consideration of circuits of distribu-tion in Africa, the USA, Europe and Asia.Similarly, the changing conditions of receptionreceive little attention, as the decline of cinemahalls and rise of broadband downloading aretouched on, but barely discussed. The bur-geoning African film festival circuit on thecontinent, in Europe, Latin America and theUSA is neglected, with the rise of festivalsin Durban, Burundi, Rwanda, Nairobi andUganda never even mentioned; FESPACO


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hardly stands alone these days. And while S, aulmentions the topic, the increasing importanceof South Africa as a centre of film productionand circulation is surprisingly absent, alongwith Kenya – in the last two years of ZIFF,these countries have swept the awards, alongwith offering M-Net and the first Kiswahilimovie channel on the continent. What thisindicates, more than anything else, is the rapidpace of innovation and change in film andmedia practices on the continent, and theway that developments on the ground are faroutpacing the capacity to capture them in anysingle volume.

WILLIAM BISSELLLafayette College (USA)

Werbner, Richard. 2011. Holy hustlers,schism, and prophecy. Apostolic reformationin Botswana. Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press. 268 pp. Pb:$24.95, £16.95. ISBN 9780520268548.Includes DVD.

Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy includesa DVD with a similarly titled documentary, re-leased in 2009. In the introduction to the book,Werbner tells us that it is important to begin bywatching the film, and only then moving to theremainder of the book (p. 3). This exercise, theauthor proposes, will inaugurate a cinematicexperience that will be extremely helpful forthe intellectual absorption of his description.

Indeed, with the induction produced bythe screening, upon reading Holy Hustlers Ifelt like embarking on a sensuous journey,marked by a profusion of colours, objects,movements and ambiences, populated by sto-ries of healing, disruption, transformation,schism and serendipity. This is also explainedby Werbner’s writing style; he deliberatelychooses to avoid extensive conceptual debates,citations and long footnotes, engaging insteadin handpicked comparative ethnography (withEngelke 2007 and Klaits 2010, for instance)and focusing on detailed, engaging descriptionand interpretation. The result is, as Werbner

expected, a cinematic book speaking to andfrom episodes that are also portrayed in thefilm.

This book is far more than an authoredaccount by a renowned and experienced an-thropologist who masters ethnographic de-scription but is also concerned with the episte-mological implications of a multi-layered fieldmethodology. It is an extremely relevant, state-of the-art portrait of contemporary AfricanChristianity through the scope of some ofits most distinctive features: schism, creativity,prophecy and power. From this perspective, itoffers, through the central figures of BishopBoitshepelo and other younger prophets whodwell in the Apostolic Eloyi and Conolliuschurches, a portrait of the moral crises andopportunities in contemporary Botswana andsouthern Africa. It is also somewhat of aculmination of Werbner’s research engagementwith religion in Botswana, highlighted in hisearlier works, in documentaries like Seance Re-flections with Richard Werbner (2004), ShadeSeekers and the Mixer (2006) and EncounteringEloyi (2008), and various papers and articles.This sense of culmination is illustrated by theway the author stands as someone ‘naturally’inserted in that context in both book and film.The final scene of the film, when Werbnerstands in the middle of the church serviceholding his recorder to the face of the prophetin the middle of an act of exorcism, is telling.

Rather than following the structure ofthe book, I will focus here on two particularmoments that happen to be portrayed inthe film too. Both are emblematic becausethey capture the powerful interplay of imageand word that Werbner puts together soskilfully in Holy Hustlers. The first momentdepicts a consultation between the prophet andbeliever/client/ill person. Werbner’s camerastands at the door, while prophet Matthewand prophet Andrew sit on a bed and engagein a funny, heart-warming dialogue betweeneach other and with the patient (p. 142 andff.). In the meantime, a negotiation takes placewhere the prophetic imagination devises andidentifies the malady. The dialectic characterof the healing session, focused around attemptsto visualise, interpret and define (recognise) the


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‘problem’ is proof of what Werbner describesas a new regime or modality of religious agencyand power in Gaborone (the ‘holy hustlers’),which is conducive of schism between stancesof orthodoxy and individuality, patrimony andinnovation. Here, a new regime of religiousexperience is exposed, one that ultimately ledto a schism among the Apostolic communityin Botswana’s capital – a creative, charismaticmode that clashes with a particular orthodoxtradition, marked by a dramatic tone, given theclash between father and sons that mediates it.

The second moment reveals a man,prophet Matthew, sitting down among debrisin the space of what used to be a church, torndown to ruins by a storm the night before(p. 121 and ff.). A churchgoer arrives and headsto a basin where the holy water used to bekept. But now the church is destroyed, and thebeliever has his doubts regarding the water’sholiness. Prophet Matthew contests and exertshis emerging authority upon the man, whoreluctantly accepts that the water is blessedbecause prophet Matthew says so. He does it,but not without wittingly ranting about theprophet’s personality on his way out. Here weperceive the ‘eventual’ character of Werbner’sethnography, how he brilliantly captures andincorporates serendipity that affects faith andthe constant (street smart) negotiation of au-thority between specialist and patient, leaderand follower, prophet and believer.

If I were to choose a common theme forthe book and film, it would be the notion of

crisis and turmoil, in the sense of creativityand transformation rather than disaster anddeprivation. This disruption is played out inseveral stances: rural/urban distinctions, gen-erational ruptures and iconoclasms, liturgicaldivergences, institutional excisions, etc. Thisis perhaps why Holy Hustlers ends with asomewhat revelatory conclusion: what beganas a mere ethnography of Apostolic reforma-tion in Botswana turns out to be a debateon the dianoia and noesis behind the multi-layered register adopted by Werbner. Thereis a certain continuity within the complexintellectual, discursive and aesthetic displayscaptured by Werbner and the political disrup-tions that emerge from them. For this reason,I believe this book deserves far more than justan Africanist or religious studies readership.It is a fascinating read for any anthropologist,regardless of expertise.

ReferencesEngelke, M. 2007. A problem of presence. Beyond

scripture in an African church. Berkeley, CA:University of California Press.

Klaits, F. 2010. Death in a church of life. Moralpassion during Botswana’s time of AIDS.Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress.

RUY LLERA BLANESUniversity of Lisbon (Portugal)London School of Economics (UK)


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