When anthropologists have turned their attention to the study of both Western and non-Western versions of capitalism, they have frequently sought subjects with which they have an affinity, given their traditional interests, and the study of kin relations in family firms and businesses has been a natural here. Not only will such scholars be grateful for Sylvia Junko Yanagisako’s superb and meticulous case study of large and midsized family businesses in the silk industry of Como, Italy, but so also will others who have studied the intersection of kinship and business, including political economists, sociologists, historians, psychologists, and family business advisors and consultants in and outside of business schools.

Yanagisako remains true to, but also in constructive, critical conversation with, the classic British school of kinship and lineage analysis (e.g., Meyer Fortes, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, et al.) rather than to the cultural approach to kinship of her teacher David Schneider. A revision-in-use of classic social-structural thinking about kinship does seem more productive than trying to provide “a cultural (symbolic) account” of Italian kinship as manifested in Como’s family firms, given the move away from systemic or holistic constructions of culture that Yanagisako recognizes and affirms at the very end of her book.

Yanagisako’s analysis is built around repeated reference to the saying among Como business families “The grandfather founded (the firm), the sons develop it, and the grandsons destroy it” (ch. 2). This saying recapitulates remarkably well the folk social theory embedded in the better-known and widespread adage in the United States and Britain “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” Not only is this ideology a virtual mantra when the topic of family businesses comes up in popular treatments and in discussions with members of business families but it also accurately reflects the temporal span of family firms in a variety of settings and pursuits. Here lineages end before they really get started, and this tension has broadly defined the core problem for ethnographers (and historians) of these families as well as for self-reflexive family members acting often as their own paraethnographers.

As Yanagisako’s study abundantly demonstrates, even for business continuity to reach and move through the third generation is a distinct accomplishment. Most family businesses break up through the difficult passage from founder to heir(s). Still, analysts perhaps cannot resist paying most attention to “successful” family firms that achieve the character of lineage and make it through what appears culturally to be the cycle that most family businesses, since the beginning of the 20th century, can expect or hope for in most places. Although he did not point specifically to family firms, Joseph A. Schumpeter undoubtedly had them in mind when he wrote about the “creative destruction” that was inherent in capitalist organization (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Harper, 1975[1942]). The system only thrives by the turnover of its units, thus, defining the difficulty of family firms surviving, despite their persistent frequency, beyond one generation, let alone an exceptional three.

Another major axiom that Yanagisako found articulated among her subjects as ideology-qua-paraethnography is that family issues and business issues should not, and do not, mix (pp. 180 ff.). This expression of the middle-class and bourgeois aspirant sensibility is widely articulated among business families. As Yanagisako argues, this sentiment of structural distinction is a mask for justifying and observing the propriety of both structured inequality and different spheres of influence marked by gender. Men rule over business issues, and women have strong influence in family issues. But these are hardly equivalent functions, nor are family and business issues clearly distinct. The effort to make them such normatively as a matter of observation or principle masks the characteristic conflicts that emerge in generational transitions. Typically, inside critiques that probe authoritative family self-understandings emerge in generational conflicts over resources, shares of wealth, and authority. These conflicts—sometimes reaching courts, and, in the United States, almost always involving lawyers and advisors—often begin in the insurgencies of dependent descendants and extended family members who try to pierce the ideological masks of family stories and the entwined realities and mystifications of business that give the family its practical reasons for solidarity (e.g., see my account of Sallie Bingham’s deconstructive and destructive challenge to her third-generation Midwest newspaper-owning family [“Endgame,” Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America, Westview, 1992]; especially in recent decades such insurgents have often been women, as the normative divide between the spheres of business and family has been breached to varying degrees in most places where capitalist enterprise has established itself). Such self-reflexive insurgents are the most astute of paraethnographers (amid the many who think about the self-conscious family–business webs in which they are bound) and are, thus, of great value to the anthropologist if she or he is able to establish a relation with them.

Although Yanagisako is keenly aware of the self-reflexive nature of business families, in which interests, emotions, sentiments, and calculation are always mutually implicated, her account tends to be structural and, therefore, functionalist in nature, albeit subtly so. Conflicts abound on the margins or between the lines of Yanagisako’s analysis (e.g., her wonderful counterintuitive insights about the consequences of betrayal among kin), and they are present in the quotations she offers, but she does not foreground these cases as vehicles of analysis. This could be a matter of limits on access or of ethical care, but in the vast popular literature on family businesses from many societies, fiction and nonfiction, narratives of conflict in generational transition and dissolution expose the most complex self-reflexive thought and action within them as a guide to ethnography.

Guided by such paraethnography, condensed in the adages or ideological principles on which she focuses to orient her own analyses as well as to give her readers a working conceptual compass, Yanagisako skillfully probes and maps the edges, the spaces of the unsaid in and around the stories that her subjects tell her, but she refrains with sensitivity and care from actually entering analytically into these spaces. Here lie the counterdiscourses of secrets, intimacy, pain and pleasure, the embarrassing, and the uncomposed. In most instances, direct exposure of these matters is not necessary for the purposes of structural analysis; distanced characterizations suffice.

Still, areas exist toward which the paraethnography of those in authority gesture in their self-reflexive adages, which they do not themselves wish to enter but which are areas for ethnographers to pursue fresh and germane insights. For example, Yanagisako probes the unsaid around the three-generation adage and the vivid stories that her subjects tell within its frame; she shows that both the stories of origin and dissolution of family firms are messier and more interesting sociologically than the stereotypic stories that family members tell. Yet few ethnographies actually enter these arenas to provide counter or alternative narrative frames to those that the families operate within. By moving into this delicate terrain, sensitive ethnography might proceed beyond the purview of paraethnographic subjects, who effectively define limits for their own and others’ inquiry.

By designing research strategies that risk the conventional narrative boundaries commonly found in fieldwork on family firms, that challenge the ideological frames of these families promoted by their own authority, the ethnographer has the opportunity to gain fresh perspective. For example, as Yanagisako points out, the topic of the dissolution of family firms has a certain value and form in the stories that are told, but in the broader arena of capitalist development, these same stories are of new beginnings or even continuities, of new sets of entanglements in which the family story is still not over (it is just over from the perspective of a particular three-generation experience with apparent perpetuation cut short). Consistent with Schumpeter’s vision of capitalism as creative destruction, family firms, more as businesses than families, are destined to dissolve, or morph, such that the power and glory of the family in the very long term depends on how the end of the myths and hopes for lineage are managed. The topic of decline is a fertile area of research for ethnographers toward which a sensitive reading, such as Yanagisako provides, of the unsaid on the narrative edges of subjects’ stories would lead.

Ultimately, the value of this study will depend on its placement in comparative analysis, in which its many fine-grained insights can most carefully be thought through. And the present is certainly propitious for undertaking such comparative work because a rich trove of both historical and ethnographic work on family businesses has appeared over the past two decades, especially for Europe (Robert Ulin’s studies of French winemakers and Antonia de Lima’s dissertation on a prominent Portuguese banking family come immediately to mind). For Europe and the United States a rich literature exists on the history of textile firms, and the literatures on family capitalism in services, manufacturing, and banking in Asia and Latin America are equally impressive.

Difference and specificity in the overall prospects for longevity as well as the shape of family conflicts and generational transitions depend significantly on the nature of the businesses that families have cultivated as well as the moment in the history of capitalism within a particular state or region. For example, banking, commodity trading, to some extent, publishing, and, until recently, merchandising and retailing are among businesses in which families have thrived, even beyond three generations. Manufacturing and craft production have fared less well as family pursuits with regard to longevity. Yanagisako expertly discusses how the trend of flexible production, pioneered in Italy during the 1970s in reaction to changing conditions that affected the price of labor, favored artisanal firms and furthered the prospects of Como’s family firms but still did not affect the expected process of devolution from an entrepreneurial founder. The economy does not care whether a family firm perdures as long as the family itself remains an effective “technology” of business organization. In this sense, a family’s own concern with perpetuation, or regrets when its enterprise is cut short, is perverse in terms of capitalist logic however much the family is a valuable source of entrepreneurship in building firms.

Given the importance of attention to the economic activity around which family firms are organized as a major axis of systematic difference in comparative analysis, the one major limitation to Yanagisako’s study is that she says relatively little about the culture and technology of the silk industry itself. Indeed, the industry could be the focus of another study, and this distinction between the culture of family and that of business might be considered more of a choice of emphasis than a difference in a very entangled reality. Nonetheless, to distinguish the culture of the business and to consider it alongside the culture of the family within the same analytic frame seem to me to be crucial to gain a fuller, bifocal vision of these composite forms of organization. Otherwise, distinguishing norms of kinship from norms of long-term business practices is sometimes difficult, as is making subtle distinctions about the character of kin relations even within the widespread “truth” of the three-generation adage. Recent advances have been made in the sociology of industries and markets, with the sensibility of ethnography in mind and coming from science and technologies studies (e.g., the recent anthropology of cultures of finance, the study of biotechnology firms, and computer technology industries, none of which are studied through an interest in family businesses, although some of them deeply involve the latter).

Yanagisako shrewdly observes that what is constitutive of kin relations in Italian firms is not some underlying ur-model of Italian family culture but a much more complex set of elements and activities tied to a labile, diversely sourced idea of “culture.” Indeed, parallel to the very private relations of family in certain firms are the traditions established over decades, if not generations, for participating in a certain business in which managing issues of trust, risk, and character are most at stake. These issues overlap with the concerns about relations within families but are also distinct from them and arise from the experiences of doing business as such. The distinctive relations of the silk industry—patterns of apprenticeship and learning, trading in raw materials, the uniquely technical nature of the business, the management of markets and price structures, deal making, generally—all exceed and also infuse sheer relations of family on which Yanagisako concentrates.

Likewise, in a Jewish banking and merchant family with whom I worked in Galveston, Texas (Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America, Westview, 1992), the strong influence of aspects of a particular business culture had become legible at the heart of family relations in the third and fourth generations. This family was in transition to fourth-generation leadership, and it had long since diversified but had amassed its fortune in cotton factoring, a very old and traditional area of trade prominent in the global history of capitalist development with a culture and set of required skills in human relations as demanding as those required in the management of relations within ambitious families. What I first mistook for mainly “ethnic family culture” I was able to trace to the experience of family leaders and aspirants to life in trading rooms and the intricate deals, judgments, and preferences that generate markets of long standing in human terms. As the family aged, the “feel” of the culture of an ancient business became a basis for managing a family of proliferating descendants and beneficiaries. I would not have seen this had I not delved into the parallel culture of business distinct from and entangled with how kinship is transacted in a family and that is always present as the silent partner in even the family’s most intimate realms. Something similar seems to be at work in Yanagisako’s case study, but the missing ethnography of the silk industry makes it impossible to do this sort of ethnographic reading of her material.

Finally, the formulation of the comparative project in which Yanagisako’s might profitably be embedded depends on how one thinks about the concept of “culture” itself, and here the last pages of Yanagisako’s work are particularly relevant. In the era when kinship theory was still a major concern of anthropologists (the 1940s trough the 1960s), and especially in U.S. cultural anthropology, culture writ large, as a coherent, distinctive system, would play a key role in defining comparative perspective on family firms. For better or worse, this construction of the idea of culture as a major axis for defining difference in comparisons declined through periods of critique during the 1980s and 1990s focused effectively on the conceptual languages of anthropology, including the culture concept itself, but without replacing or doing away with the necessity of the continued use of culture as naming anthropology’s primary object of study. This has had frustrating consequences with which anthropologists have had to deal ever since. For example, although distinctly Italian things go on in Yanagisako’s family firms, to think that a determinate model or logic of Italian familism is operating here would be a mistake. The old culture concept, thoroughly critiqued as such, is too blunt an instrument to deal with culture in pieces, in flux, and entangled with other things that are not culture—in short, with culture as heterogeneity. Not even culture as a derivable system of logic or logics with complex variants could satisfy the more deconstructive tendencies in thinking about the concept. Thus, the structural dimensions of kinship with which Yanagisako deals are heterogeneously determined and irreducible to tokens of underlying and systematic cultural logics. Furthermore, one cannot possibly, at least in the domain of family firms, give Italian kinship, a “cultural account” (e.g., in the style of Schneider) and still explain how it manifests itself in hybrid relation to capitalist organization and practices. The result, then, is that even though Yanagisako successfully conveys an Italian sensibility within her material, what impresses me more is how much her case is like family capitalism elsewhere, especially in the United States and elsewhere in Europe in the same historical period of modernity. Is this significantly an effect of the inadequacy of the culture concept, once critiqued, to convey difference sufficiently well, or is it a result that only becomes clear when the complex partiality of culture mixes with the powerful pressures that capitalist enterprise exerts on the limited number of forms that family firms can take? Both are true, but I tend to favor the latter implication more.

Yanagisako leaves little room for a systematic cultural framework. Characteristic of the theoretical style with which we do anthropology now, Yanagisako argues that “neither families nor capitalism in Italy are products of Italian culture. Italian culture, after all, is merely a heuristic device” (p. 188). Continuing change is the one certain factor, and accounts of it must remain open to combinations of elements that used to vie as components of analytic–descriptive models or underlying structures. Even in structural accounts, the job is no longer to construct these kinds of conceptual things. Within the single case study, the idea of heterogeneity, flux, antistructure, and the caution of reification can be sustained. The problem of requiring something more arises when case studies are prepared for participation in comparative analyses, in which they find their special value. Here, more and alternative conceptual work is required. Nowhere in anthropology does this challenge have a solution, but it is being addressed (see, e.g., Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Blackwell, 2005).

Rather than with a plea for comparison, Yanagisako concludes by noting that the end of reifying ideas of culture does not mean the end of a usable notion of “culture” and, thus, the consequent urge to replace it with something else, like the equally reifying behemoth of global capitalism. She, thus, ends pragmatically by calling for more local analyses in which culture is implicated but in the complex unresolved and underdetermined ways that it is in her own exemplary study. I agree with this pragmatic approach in producing basic ethnography while hoping for alternative concepts and ways to do comparative projects that give the more difficult and complex current understandings of culture their due. In my view, for the topic of family firms, only in the meeting points between family and specific sorts of businesses can this be attempted. Yanagisako’s is a model study of the family in the firm, deserving closer study and replication, and as such, is halfway there.

After a long period of declining numbers and of predictions about their transformation into non-Indians, the number of Brazilians self-identifying as indigenous has begun to grow. Jonathan Warren examines the shift in which people who might once have claimed mixed-race status instead reconstruct themselves as “post-traditional” Indians. His is, thus, a study of changing categories of identity and the forging of those reckonings around “a longing, an orientation, that involves an active attempt to rediscover, recuperate and reinvigorate that which has been dismembered” (p. 21).

Simply because Warren explores qualitatively Brazil’s contemporary indigenous resurgence, Racial Revolutions is a must read. Despite the author’s penchant for neologisms, his account is a clearly and engagingly written diagnostic of an increasing emphasis on identities, of the political and cultural rights important to worldwide indigenous movements and Brazil’s recent redemocratization, and of a cultivation of tradition and origins salient in political discourse today.

Warren builds on Frederick Barth’s insights into boundaries, claiming that if people “envision ethnic divisions, then ethnic groups can be maintained despite cultural change and in the absence of ‘real’ cultural differences” (p. 217). This challenges ideas of indigenous communities existing in the past, on the nation’s periphery, and within a continuous pre-Columbian tradition. Instead, these communities are maintained and re-created today through the “Law of the Indio,” or a “symbolic order in which Indianness can be experienced as … of worth and significance” (p. 205). This logic enables people to set themselves against definitions of Indianness that revolve around phenotype and savagery. Warren argues that, despite this “Law of the White,” indigenous identities encompass a broad range of physical traits and involve tradition’s recovery rather than unbroken transmission of core ideals. Although Warren is unclear whether such recovery emanates from differentiation and reinvention or the reconstruction of something once present but submerged among a people he believes remain, at base, indigenous despite their misplaced mixed race identifications, the argument is compelling. Yet it is also troubling.

A dichotomous reading of identity around “laws” promises much yet ultimately leaves important questions unanswered. Warren does not show in a nuanced way how people traverse or establish boundaries between laws. Instead, he asserts that they do so, motioning at competing worldviews in interviews and life histories that juxtapose information without providing a way of evaluating conversations. This lapse may stem from research conducted in multiple sites. It is especially noticeable when Warren moves to an indigenous village built on what was first a plantation worked by slaves and then a prison labor camp for Indians. A richer site is difficult to imagine for investigation of the situation of indigenous (and Afro-descendent) people emerging from the violence of conquest and the postcolony. Yet Warren shies away from an ethnography of the embodied relations and everyday practices hinted at in the book’s photographs.

A concerted engagement with people’s relationship to social process might point more clearly to the ways that Brazilians have made sense out of a historically specific field in which they have become, or made themselves, Indian. This landscape, which Warren paints as more of a scattered backdrop of discrimination than a lived negotiation of victories and defeats, might include improvements in infant mortality, uneven and sometimes cynical, but nonetheless increasing, governmental attention to indigenous–landowner disputes, and greater rural access to schools and transportation. Such programs, whose presence but not whose efficacy were apparent in the 1990s, may have helped catalyze different identity politics. Although Warren makes a point of pointing to the state, a multifaceted approach to the contradictions of state-directed “care” would have situated indigenous resurgence in clearer material and interpretive contexts. It would also have made more complex one of the strongest aspects of the book, Warren’s convincing refutation of “racial hucksterism” (pp. 94–113), the claim that indigenous identification is but a cynical attempt to take advantage of government programs.

Despite the debunking of the claim that indigenous identification is but a rational and very capitalist choice, Warren fails to question sufficiently how phenomena and canons relate. He reviews biological thought without noting how a southern cone Lamarckianism renders Brazilian biology quite different from North America’s. And in arguing that Brazil’s Black Movement has not attracted a popular following despite dominating research agendas, he jumps from Salvador’s Ilê Aiyê (founded in the 1970s) to southern Brazil’s Frente Negra of the 1930s and on to South Africa’s African National Congress. Not only does Warren fail to theorize his axes of comparison, but he also fails to note that Ilê Aiyê is enormously influential among working-class Afro-Bahians. Similar issues are apparent as Warren draws on evidence from Brazil, Mexico, and North America without considering debates, histories, and positions in the global order. Errors in Portuguese and misspellings of Brazilian researchers’ names compound these problems.

Nonetheless, Warren puts his finger on critical trends in Latin America today. He is one of the first to begin to unpack in English the explosive growth in indigenous populations in Brazil in the 1990s. He has, thus, helped set a research agenda. And he has done so by writing powerfully against discrimination and in a sincere and engaged manner. Racial Revolutions will continue to spark debate and inspire other social scientists’ efforts in the years to come. That is more than enough reason to read, argue with, and find inspiration in this compelling monograph that addresses a still-puzzling phenomenon.

Tourism is a huge, global industry deeply implicating culture, consumption, meaning, and place; and it deserves the considerable academic attention it receives. The disciplines from which studies emerge include anthropology, history, sociology, English literature, American studies, architecture, urban planning, resource management, and geography, among others. This collection of essays illustrates the disciplinary variety well: The authors include Sylvia Rodriguez and David White, anthropologists; Erika Bsumek, Phoebe Kropp, Char Miller, Hal Rothman, and Marguerite Shaffer, historians (Miller is also involved in urban studies, Shaffer in American studies); Leah Dilworth, a professor of English; Rena Swentzell, who holds degrees in architecture and American studies and writes from the perspective of a member of Santa Clara Pueblo; William Bryan, a natural resources planner; Susan Guyette, owner of a cross-cultural planning firm; and Chris Wilson, a professor of cultural landscape studies. Bryan, Guyette, and White are also practically involved in planning or directing tourism in ways that attempt to both preserve culture and provide economic development.

Variety is a strength of the book, although the result is perhaps a certain lack of focus. All of the essays detail the way in which class, consumption, and capitalism structure tourism. Editor Rothman, who has written extensively on tourism, does not illuminate this shared interpretive focus. Instead, his introductory and closing essays add to the range rather than elucidating themes or comparing points raised by other authors. Under the umbrella theme of “selling the past,” the essays touch on some of the many topics and perspectives of the subject as it pertains to tourism in the American West. Dilworth, Rodriguez, and Wilson examine the way in which politics and ideology play out in cultural tourism, both individual and ethnic or national, as do Bryan and Swentzell. The economics of tourism are represented by Bryan, Miller, and—implicitly, as economic development—Guyette and White. Miller discusses the pressures and politics of state legislatures and chambers of commerce, and Bryan details of price, profitability and size. Bryan and Guyette and White explore the possibilities of, or at least the hope for, what might be called a “moral” tourist economy—moral in the sense that it attempts to minimize cultural and ecological impact and to make special sorts of experiences affordable and, thus, widely accessible, while making the financial return (in these essays, to Native and nonprofit groups or communities who are working with tourists) that a capitalist economy requires.

Essays that examine the construction and shaping of meaning predominate: Bsumek, Dilworth, Kropp, Rothman, Shaffer, and Wilson investigate the making of tourist destinations, commodities and the process of commodification, and the arts and objects sold to tourists. Kropp explores the history of a narrative that is developed to draw tourists to the California missions; Bsumek, Dilworth, and Shaffer, in very different ways, focus on objects—Native American crafts, Southwest souvenirs, and scrapbooks, respectively.

Notwithstanding the subtitle, Wilson deals partly, and Rothman wholly, with the present. Wilson examines present stereotypes of the representation of the Southwest, the tricultural “iconic distillations” (p. 32) that have long been offered by various agencies to promote New Mexico as a tourist destination, in art, by art, or in information about art. Rothman, in contrast, describes Las Vegas, its inauthenticity and glitter, as a future. Not for him the tourism of traditional culture, the romantic past, and if he evokes Las Vegas by contrast to some free-handed stereotypes about New York City, at least the reader is given an interestingly iconoclastic view of the Nevada city. But I have to ask, how does such a scholarly distillation differ from a public relations description?

Tourism is a fruitful field of study for anthropologists, not least because it involves behavior, interaction, and change; economics and politics; and issues of (among other things) stereotyping, modernity, and authenticity. I, for one, would have enjoyed more anthropological insights and references to anthropological literature, especially regarding people. Shaffer, boldly stating the silent assumption of most of these authors, describes the common attitude toward tourists: “I suspect we have all shunned the tourist hordes scurrying from one spectacle to the next with their guidebooks in hand … exuding a superficial yet insatiable curiosity” (p. 73). This tradition of disdain for and stereotyping of tourism and tourists goes back at least to the 18th century. Tourists—all of us, as Shaffer notes—are people engaged in an exchange of sorts and it behooves us, especially anthropologists, to look more closely at behavior, perceptions, and less obvious effects. Rodriguez, describing the complex political arena of the American Southwest, writes, “Stay tuned” (p. 202). To which I add, and listen to more than one station—the anthropological perspective is multichanneled and designed to strip, examine, and explore stereotypes, starting with our own.

It takes a brave soul to frame a contemporary collection of anthropological work as “the anthropology of Britain” (or anywhere else), a phrase that echoes perilously the cold war language of area studies. Nigel Rapport, editor of this anthology of articles on contemporary Britain, makes a claim for this title, arguing that “this is a book which makes Britain primary in anthropological terms and does not see the need always to legitimize itself by drawing comparisons between Britain and ‘other cultures’; nor does it feel that its lack of formal ‘exoticism’ required special pleading” (p. 5). By framing this collection with this rather defensive introduction, however, Rapport risks undermining the value of his own enterprise, suggesting that something really is slightly suspect about an anthropology of the very place that was arguably the metropolitan birthplace of the discipline itself. He makes the case somewhat worse by going on to claim that “anthropology in Britain has the potential, I contend … of providing some of the best that the discipline can offer because an anthropologist thoroughly at home in linguistic denotation, and familiar with behavioural form, is more able to appreciate the connotative” (p. 7). This same assertion might be made about the anthropology of the United States or about any other place where anthropologists turn the lens back on their own societies. Why should Britain be the exceptional case?

The answer has more to do with the institutionalization of anthropology in Britain than it does with any larger theoretical or methodological issues. Much of the work in this book, however, represents not just “the best of British,” as Anthony Cohen (who has mentored many of the anthropologists featured in the book, including Rapport) writes in his epilogue; these scholars also represent some of the best of anthropology anywhere, and for that reason alone, their work deserves a wide readership.

The book is organized into five thematic sections, each preceded by a commentary by Rapport. The articles address a wide range of topics, including the royal family (Anne Rowbottom), the London ballet (Helena Wulff), the postindustrial landscape of a former mining village (Andrew Dawson), British Quakers (Peter Collins), and Rapport’s own literarily inflected work on the worldview from a British village. An excellent article by Jeanette Edwards on everyday understandings of science is based on her interviews with women about childbirth and new reproductive technologies. Sarah Green provides an imaginative discussion of the relationship between cybernetworks and face-to-face networks, demonstrating that the virtual is far more like the “real” than many proponents of new communication technologies might recognize. And Alison James, a pioneer in the growing field of the anthropology of childhood, contributes a chapter in which she considers how the discourse around parenting is reflected in children’s own views of socialization.

Many of the chapters deal implicitly with questions of national identity, and two chapters deal explicitly with ethnicity: Carol Trosset and Douglas Caulkins provide an interesting methodological chapter on ethnic identity and values among the Welsh, and Vered Amit applies theoretical insights on diasporas to her study of Armenians in London. But, although these articles and many others offer implicit insights into the project of nation-building in contemporary Britain, it is with respect to this particular (and critical) domain that the book falls somewhat short.

One of the most fascinating and theoretically rich areas of research into Britain has been the examination of its transformation into a multicultural society, particularly in the context of contemporary Europe. The incorporation of Britain into the European Union, steady rates of immigration from Britain’s once-colonial outposts, and even the threat of Scottish and Welsh autonomy have contributed to a sense that “Englishness” and “Britishness” have both become more diffuse, more difficult to define, more fractured and possibly less meaningful in everyday life. Indeed, a report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, commissioned by an independent think tank called the Runnymeade Trust, provoked a heated debate a few years ago on how racially and ethnically inclusive terms like English and British really are at the present time.

Although the work of such seminal thinkers in critical race theory as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall is cited in several of the pieces, as a whole the collection reflects a view of Britain as largely white, tranquil, and middle class. In fact, the highly flammable solvent of Margaret Thatcher’s radical neoliberal policies of the 1980s (which have mostly continued under subsequent governments), once poured over British society resulted in an explosion of racial and class conflagrations in a number of cities. That analysis of much of this drama is missing from the collection somewhat weakens the case for its representativeness as an anthropology of contemporary Britain; the editor also missed the opportunity to include some of the most theoretically challenging work on race and nation-building available today. As an anthology of interesting and engaging work in contemporary anthropology, however, the collection stands firmly on its own merits and needs no other justification. It should find an enthusiastic audience on both sides of the Atlantic.

Although relatively rare events, school shootings have gained increasing attention in the media, the home, and the classroom. Television images of wounded and panic-stricken students fleeing from institutions like Columbine High School have become seared in Americans’ collective consciousness as emblematic of the social and emotional turmoil experienced by many adolescents today, especially among white males living in small towns or suburban communities, where most shootings occur. Unfortunately, very little in the way of systematic and scholarly research has focused on the causes and consequences of such events.

Katherine Newman and her colleagues have made a significant attempt to address this deficiency in their examination of the causes and consequences of two school shootings, one that occurred in 1997 at Heath High School near Paducah, Kentucky, and the other in 1998 at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, Arkansas. In the first event, a 14-year-old boy was charged with the deaths of three students and injuries to five others. In the second event, two boys, ages 11 and 13, were charged with the deaths of four students and one teacher and injuries to nine other students and one teacher.

To understand the reasons for these and similar events, Harvard sociologist Newman and a team of four graduate students conducted interviews with 163 people in the affected communities as part of a National Academy of Sciences study of lethal school violence mandated by Congress in 1999. Rather than focus exclusively on the psychological explanations, the authors emphasize the social dynamics that led to the tragedies at Heath and Westside. They note that “shooters choose schools as the site for a rampage because they are the heart and soul of public life in small towns” (p. 15). Such communities obscure the warning signs of impending shootings by limiting the flow of information on at-risk youth and their behavior, and they provide such youth few opportunities for developing and maintaining self-esteem and mental health. Within this social context, the authors identify five specific conditions for rampage school shootings: the shooter’s perception of himself as extremely marginal in the social worlds that matter to him; psychosocial problems that magnify the impact of marginality; cultural scripts that prescribe violence by firearm as a way of solving problems; the failure of surveillance systems intended to identify troubled teens before their problems become extreme; and gun availability.

The book also offers an excellent illustration of the difficulties of conducting research on this topic. Approximately three years had passed between the time of the shootings in each community and the initiation of fieldwork by the investigators. Much of the data collected may, therefore, have been subjected to retrospective bias and selective recall as key players forgot important events or constructed new explanations for their occurrence. The investigators were unable to interview the shooters and their parents or access court records. Many community members, particularly parents of victims, declined to participate in the study, citing either impending litigation or a concern that such research would perpetuate a negative image of the community to the outside world. The very difficulties cited by the researchers in gaining access to information about prior disciplinary episodes in the lives of the shooters may have compromised their analysis of the significance of these episodes. Consequently, their conclusions at times appear somewhat speculative or based on hearsay rather than direct evidence. This is not unexpected, given the difficulties in attempting to conduct research in traumatized communities in a timely manner. Nevertheless, the result is a tendency to underemphasize the importance of individual characteristics and overemphasize the importance of social and organizational context in explaining why these events occurred. Similarly, the attempt to draw conclusions from a broader sample of school shootings is also limited by such events’ relative rarity, which provides insufficient power for quantitative analysis.

These limitations notwithstanding, Newman and her colleagues offer some valuable insights: that the causes of school shootings are multifactoral, with no single characteristic taking precedence in explaining why they occur; that blame for such events rests not solely with the boys who committed these acts of violence but also with the communities that have raised and educated them; and that prevention of such events lies in fostering a culture of recognition and response to behavior that signals a risk for violence to self or to others. These insights represent an important first step in the prevention of youth violence, in general, and rampage school shootings, in particular.

One would like to ask: is there . . . no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time [that a friend has] come through [a] long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded . . . in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? . . . But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard. . . . If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. . . . [And] what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer? [Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents]

During the two years prior to Anwar Sadat’s 1981 assassination, the Egyptian government relocated thousands of working-class families from the Bulaq neighborhood along Cairo’s Nile Corniche, to hastily built public housing units on the dusty northeast outskirts of the city. These families joined older waves of migrants flowing into Cairo and others whose urban housing had been razed in the early 1960s. The mud-brick houses on land redistributed to local agricultural laborers after the 1952 revolution were first linked to the city by roads and tramlines and then eaten up by proliferating five-story concrete and brick apartment blocks.

Justifying the relocation—a real estate windfall in which center city land compensated at 30 Egyptian pounds (LE) per square meter was expected to fetch LE 1,000 on the market once it was cleared of its residents—were two complementary desires articulated by the tangle of bureaucrats, businessmen, intellectuals, foreign concerns, and others who shape policy and politics in Egypt. One desire was aesthetic, one moral. The aesthetic goal was “to beautify Cairo’s face” through a “dangerous plastic surgery,” in the words of one newspaper columnist, ridding Cairo’s heart of its drug dealers, peddlers, female dancers, and street entertainers (Ghannam, pp. 33–34) and clearing the way for “modern buildings, luxury housing, five-star hotels, offices, multistory parking lots, movie theaters, conference halls, and ‘centers of culture’ ” on the model of modern cities like Houston and Los Angeles (Ghannam, p. 30).

The moral goal emerged from the humanistic framework that underwrites the social scientific worldview from psychology to economics. Relocating low-income populations from the crowded, inadequate, and unhealthy environment of the urban slum to modern housing in the spacious suburbs would revive not only urban space but also the morality and productivity of the people themselves. “We have terrorism because we have unplanned areas and old narrow neighborhoods, which produce ignorance and backwardness,” in the words of a woman who has internalized this notion (Ghannam, p. 41). If crime, addiction, backwardness, and poverty itself are the results of the environmental factors shaping people’s habits, then these social ills can be addressed through altering and improving their environment, giving them separate kitchens and bathrooms in which they can live modern lives.

Showing the linkages between their experiences and the global and national processes that help shape them—for example, elite pursuit of global investment and tourism revenue—Farha Ghannam’s Remaking the Modern analyzes the way relocated families and their new neighbors have understood and remade their lives in their new neighborhood of al-Zawiya al-Hamra through complex changes in their material, social, and symbolic relationships. Predictably, most families received in their new dwellings no more rooms than they had had in their original neighborhood. But as examples of Michel de Certeau’s “ordinary practitioners of the city” (Ghannam, p. 16), the more fortunate among them have been able to refit the new inadequate spaces that they have been traded for their old, enclosing balconies, removing walls, turning public rooms into bedrooms for children, using courtyards as spaces to buy and sell, socialize, and raise animals, turning apartments into clinics, shops, and offices to compensate for the absence of promised infrastructure, and otherwise integrating work and family life in familiar ways that the relocation had aimed to separate and rationalize.

Older neighbors, who took for granted the government’s labeling of Bulaq migrants as “thieves,” “vagrants,” and “drug dealers,” have been less quick to embrace the accompanying notion that such qualities were changed by the relocation and continue to stigmatize the newcomers in many ways. Ghannam demonstrates how people place themselves and their neighborhoods within an intricate web of ideas about origin and character, popular and upper-class lifestyles, the problems and attractions of consumerism, geographic mobility, the use of time, notions of privacy, gender roles, and family responsibility. In the universe of disruptive modernity, it is, finally, the mosque that offers unity in heterogeneity even as the peripheral neighborhood becomes a new center relative to the even newer satellite cities being established in the desert, and to the lives of its labor migrants working in the Gulf. The transformations of space, time, and labor that Ghannam outlines were not those foreseen by the planners of a globalized and modern Cairo, even though—or perhaps because—it was primarily their interests that were being served in the plans for its transformation.

It is the interests of those technocratic elites—indeed, the very conditions of their creation—that concern Timothy Mitchell in Rule of Experts. In a set of chapters most of which are thoroughly revised and updated versions of articles published previously, Mitchell does for rural Egypt what Ghannam has done for Cairo. He demonstrates in detail how peasants and other villagers have been brought into being as intellectual and practical objects of development through practices that simultaneously constitute new social forms and systems of control—for example, the economy considered as a bounded object—and new disciplinary forms of expertise, observation, and planning (economics, hydroengineering, public health). The language of rationalizing the poor by transforming them either into controllable resources or into an active, healthy national citizenry runs through the cases Mitchell examines, from the mid-19th-century creation of privately owned, barracklike villages in which “the owner imposed on his tenants a plan where everything had its logical place” (Mitchell, p. 68) to the relocation of the village of Gurna in the late 1940s.

Just as the plan to raze Cairo’s Bulaq neighborhood pointed to the embarrassment of elites that the poor were spoiling the Nile view with their degeneracy, so the plan to relocate Gurna resulted from the embarrassment of elites that an ancient necropolis near Luxor was in danger from alleged mistreatment by locals whose backward lifestyle tended to thievery and disease. A model village planned by architect Hasan Fathy was carved from sugarcane fields to showcase a newly developed vernacular architecture “that was pure and undebased, and thus clean and sanitary . . . provid[ing] a means to the recovery of social energy, health, and purpose” for a new peasantry (Mitchell, p. 189). Like the new dwellings at al-Zawiya al-Hamra, though, this planned modernity failed to provide the promised benefits. Most residents had little interest in moving (the new village had no employment opportunities aside from a textile workshop manned by children), and the new domed houses—a misappropriation of sacred elements for domestic use—were expensive, difficult to construct, and unable to expand as families did. Although Fathy’s model village ultimately failed, Gurna relocation projects waxed and waned over decades, their final stages in the 1990s marked, like those earlier in Bulaq, by violence as the state brought in police to crush local resistance (Ghannam p. 35; Mitchell p. 200).

In projects of this sort one sees the difficulties of making the nation. To perform the nation, groups must be included by first declaring them excluded for their lack of civilization, villages destroyed in order to preserve them, pasts declared lost so that they may be recovered. . . . The Gurnawis were to be treated as ignorant, uncivilized, and incapable of preserving their own . . . heritage. Only by seeing them in this way would the architect have an opportunity to intervene, presenting himself as the rediscoverer of a local heritage that the locals themselves no longer recognized or knew how to value. As the spokesman bringing this heritage into national politics, the architect would enable the past to speak and play its role in giving the modern nation its character. [Mitchell 2002:191]

Developing further the thesis put forward in his 1988 Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge University Press), that modern politics rests on apprehending the world as bifurcated into a set of organizing models of reality that represent or display an underlying order, such that understanding those models will allow the more effective manipulation of the world, Mitchell uses his varied Egyptian case studies to formulate a general theory of expertise and technocracy. Expertise as a set of practices originates in the opening of the gap between binaries that organize modern thought: nature and technology, object and value, economy and economics, reality and representation (Mitchell, p. 15). Expertise attaches itself to “these separations [that] allow reason to rule, and allow history to be organized as the unfolding of a locationless logic” (Mitchell, p. 15). The apprehension of this logic, in turn, drove the creation and systematization of social practices—surveys, censuses, legislation—that gave that invisible logic material form. Social thinkers of the early to mid-20th century, apprehending changes in colonial patterns of currency circulation, land ownership, wages and commodity prices, “internal” migration, and so on, transferred their attention from “the city” as a tangible symbol for dense relationships of exchange to a new object, “the economy,” an invisible web of rule-governed connections whose laws could be measured and analyzed statistically. “The statistical information . . . did not simply represent a preexisting sphere of economic activity. It helped to bring this sphere, with its anxious participants, into being” (Mitchell, p. 103).

That similar locationless logics have suffused the thought and practice of other times and places and not just modern systems of governmentality (one thinks most immediately of Plato and his intellectual descendants) does not necessarily detract from Mitchell’s case. For the Middle East specialist, at least, any of the stories Mitchell has “retrieve[d] . . . from the footnotes” of Egyptian history (p. 277) is worth the price of admission. In two of the book’s most critical chapters, “The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant” (ch. 4) and “The Object of Development” (ch. 7), Mitchell shows how enduring mental images structure, direct, and deform thought about local realities. The image of a country whose arable land consists of an intense but narrow thread of green bisecting a heartless desert has resulted in decades of questionable assumptions about overpopulation, resource stress, and “natural” land shortage in Egypt, without attending to the social and political processes through which resources and land have been distributed. The big point, that the operation of hegemony requires the world of expertise to deceive itself into thinking that those local realities exist independently of contemporary interest in and influence over them, is never lost. In “The Character of Calculability” (ch. 3), Mitchell shows how cadastral surveys and trade statistics bring into being not greater or more accurate knowledge, but

a reformatted knowledge, information that has been translated, moved, shrunk, simplified, redrawn. What is new is the site, and the forms of calculation and decision that can take place at this new site. . . . The movement from the field to the survey office was not to be experienced as a chain of social practices, but as the distance between reality and its representation, between the material and the abstract, between the real world and the map. [p. 116]

Just as these specific practices brought into being an “economy” as a system of rules where before there had been only diverse collections of practices of production, exchange, and consumption, so Mitchell’s most impressive claims about the theoretical underpinnings of the rule of experts always emerge from his small-scale investigations of the technics of modernity.

For Mitchell, “social theory” and “social science” as generically conceived and normatively practiced treat material factors like disease, agriculture, chemicals, and technology as passive externals sundered from human agency. Beginning in chapter 1, “Can the Mosquito Speak?” he critiques this generic social theory for categorically distinguishing human agency from the world on which it works, a world that can have no influence over “the very possibility of the human, of intentionality, of abstraction” (Mitchell, p. 29). Practitioners of social, political, economic, and agricultural reform, not to mention public health and engineering, misconstrue the nature of the natural objects humans have helped create in silent partnership with nonhuman forces. “But this misapprehension was necessary, for it was exactly how the production of techno-power proceeded. Overlooking the mixed way things happen, indeed producing the effect of neatly separate realms of reason and the real world, ideas and their objects, the human and the nonhuman, was how power was coming to work . . . in the twentieth century in general” (Mitchell, p. 52). Mitchell views this form of technopolitics as historically stable, extending the argument beyond current practices of international development institutions like the World Bank and USAID. In a larger sense, though, he implies that social science, as such, is inescapably trapped in the restricted logic of the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The many anthropologists who have produced similarly devastating critiques of development programs might disagree that “social science” is quite so hobbled.

One might, in fact, object that critical scholars in most disciplines have long moved well beyond such blindness with respect both to agency and to the material world. Even the most conventional historians, inspired by Fernand Braudel or William McNeill, realized half a century ago that disease and agriculture are of world-shaping significance, and most anthropology has not been quite so idealist since Edward Burnett Tylor. That few policy makers, financiers, and bureaucrats attend either to historians or to anthropologists does not mean that more sophisticated approaches have not been developed but merely that some disciplines are better than others at producing technicians for the modern world system because their technics work so effectively to benefit their masters. (Whatever else Mitchell’s book is, it is not a good advertisement either for economics or for Mitchell’s home discipline of political science, whose cruder forms of modernization theory stand for him as representatives of the broad spectrum of social thought and against which the entire volume is an extended argument). Mitchell invents and reinvents critiques of social theory familiar from Karl Marx (whom he discusses) as well as Bernard Cohn, Eric Wolf, and Marilyn Strathern (whom he does not) for presentation to scholars in disciplines who do not normally encounter them. He has the tactical advantage over both Marx and Strathern, however, of writing in the language of his targets, marshaling economic statistics and detailed historical reconstruction in generally clear prose to illustrate the systemic failure rather than the generalizable successes of both individual development programs and the intellectual frameworks they generate and in which they flourish.

Watching Mitchell at work, either in writing or in personal presentations, has long reminded me of watching actor Robert Patrick as the liquid-metal assassin in director James Cameron’s 1991 movie Terminator 2. There is a terrible fascination in viewing the focused carnage: swift, sharp, relentless, and utterly without mercy. (In Mitchell’s case, at least, I mean this as a compliment). The strength of Mitchell’s assiduous and brilliant work, like Ghannam’s, is the skill with which he retrieves, assembles, dissects, and uses specific case studies as rebuttals to the universalizing rhetoric of modernity, rational choice, and development. That the theory of the social sciences helps create worlds in which social scientists rule as experts is not very surprising (Marx again, on ruling ideas). But if the usefulness of any particular case study “is not for making any general point about the impact of [e.g.] market reforms but to argue against general points” (Mitchell, p. 261), then this writing against theory joins Lila Abu-Lughod’s writing against culture to induce potential paralysis, to one’s not being able to write anything at all but thick description. Because this idea is built, in turn, on Mitchell’s very general Occidentalist theory about the nature of modern governmentality, and because he so successfully and often articulates general points, his critique of theory loses much of its force.

Lost, also, is the sense that “modernity” in many of its meanings can come to have more positive significance for the people whose lives it transforms and that those significances are distributed not only by class and region but also by gender. This is partly the effect of Mitchell’s documentary sources (“Nobody Listens to a Poor Man,” as the title of ch. 5 says, not to mention a woman) and partly the effect of the differences in power between even the urban and rural poor. It is also, perhaps, the result of what sometimes appears to be a romantic attachment to the notion of the authenticity of an independent rural life unencumbered by outside structures of power: the landlord, the police, the cotton market, the international agency. Mitchell stresses the failure of land redistribution schemes in Egypt ever to go quite far enough, to provide peasants with a sustainable livelihood. This is surely true, but part of appreciating the disruptive effects of modern technopolitics needs to be the recognition that, as restricted as their choices might be, both poor village and city dwellers still have choices to make, a grounded moral reality that the abstract discourse of technopolitics as metaanalysis has difficulty incorporating. If modern technical and administrative systems are essentially the result of a collusive misreading of truth on the part of interpenetrating groups of elites (academic economists, bureaucrats, landowners, bankers, militaries, and others who often fill multiple roles), then little room remains for thinking either about corruption (because the system is itself corrupt) or about the way ordinary people work the system and help initiate change from below.

Ghannam finds that many of the relocated Bulaq residents in al-Zawiya al-Hamra incorporated optimistic statist definitions of modernity but that they contested them, as well, sometimes along gendered lines. Women emphasized technology’s central positive contributions to modernity, whereas men were more wary of its threat to proper moral and social action. “El-tamaddun [modernity] is like a knife with two edges; if not handled carefully, it can kill,” warned one of her interlocutors (Ghannam, p. 135). The “blind imitation” that earlier generations of Egyptian intellectuals identified as a source of their own region’s technological and political weakness relative to Europe is now turned neatly against those who would blindly imitate Western fashion, consumerism, sexuality, and alienated, individualistic mores.

As active social agents, people are able to selectively appropriate certain aspects of what they see as modern. Modernity stimulates desires. It motivates dreams. It causes joy. It causes disruption. It causes pain and suffering. It is struggled over and is reworked and selectively appropriated from specific locations in the social space. [Ghannam, p. 137]

Freud’s modern dilemma of the absent child is lived over and over again in Ghannam’s Cairo as families fragment into dispersed domestic units supported by labor migrants. Some of these families have coped with absence by using the ubiquitous cassette tape. Capturing the voice and something of the presence of loved ones, available to the literate and the nonliterate, taped “letters” back and forth between home and family members working in the Gulf solidify the migrant’s connection with family, neighbors, and friends. They are also links to broader sets of ideas about the organization of local space, as these workers remit both money and ideas for renovating the apartments they have in new neighborhoods in preparation for marriage and the establishment of new families. “Although relocation excluded them from its center, [relocated families] reinforce their belonging to Cairo through the products of their labor. . . . They are making a history of Cairo from their particular location in the social space” (Ghannam, p. 166). The cramped images of Egyptian physical and economic geography to which Mitchell attributes so much misconceived development policy are only one set of images in play. The multiple images of a global Cairo in the minds of Cairenes and in the minds of the experts of all sorts who imagine and manipulate them have their own ways of inducing new forms of exclusion but also new forms of participation.

This book is based on field research into the world of gambling in the Cretan town of Chania. The research focused on gamblers at work, as it were. Thomas Malaby has obviously observed plenty of gambling activity, and he draws on these data to document his performative approach to gambling. Near the beginning of the book (p. 22), he states that he will not focus on life histories or on the gamblers’ expansive reflections about their practices, but this delimitation is perhaps too modest. At several points during the book the gamblers deliver wonderful observations on life and risk taking. Certainly, the final chapter makes good use of Nikos’s statements, such as his gnomic reflection before dying young from liver failure, that “the biggest risk in life is friendship” (p. 74). The interest and quality of these collected data are matched by the power of the narrative, for example, the delightful description of the technique for slapping down backgammon pieces onto the playing board (p. 65)—a sight and sound familiar to anyone who has spent time in Greece. The overall result is a highly readable book that will be accessible to students at all levels while offering much to advanced researchers.

Malaby’s main theoretical goal is to offer a new way of conceptualizing risk. Researchers have constructed, he says, typologies of society (e.g., traditional vs. modern) based on how people understand and respond to risk. Anthony Giddens, for example, has contended that modernity involves the ongoing assessment of risk and its rational confrontation; risk-taking behaviors represent failures of rationality. Malaby makes the useful observation that risk has been intellectualized and macrotheorized, but few have taken the trouble to do the ethnography of risk. Granted that all people confront risks in our daily lives, but how do we act or perform in the face of it? This study offers particular ethnographic insight into the ways in which gamblers in Chania, primarily men, confront the risks of gambling. The frame of reference inevitably extends beyond actual gaming to consider gambling as a metaphor for confronting other life situations such as business, illness, and relationships. The gamblers themselves constantly make these associations.

Malaby’s main finding is that, in the face of the greatest uncertainty, Cretan men perform surety, composure, arrogance, and bravado. When things are most dangerous and ruinously out of control, one must not evince fear or despair but project the impression of unfazed, knowing mastery, which Malaby perceptively labels “instrumental nonchalance” (p. 87). The concepts gamblers appeal to in explaining success or failure (e.g., fate, odds, purity), he terms “tropes of accountability” (p. 20). These tropes inform the ways in which people square up to risk and to life, in general. To perform fear or self-pity is to have already lost, as in the case of the gambling café owner who grouses about how few customers he has, thereby causing even those few to desert his shop. The situation contrasts with the response of Max Weber’s early Calvinists who, when faced with the uncertainty of theodicy, elected to perform upstanding frugality.

This is a highly circumscribed book that focuses a narrow beam on gambling activity and does not ethnographically investigate the positions and situations of the men in their family lives or daily employment or in relation to society outside the gambling den. I would like to know many more details, ranging from how gambling sits with one’s domestic partner to whether there is, indeed, continuity in performance from gambling to daily life situations. Is gambling just a game or part of one’s whole lifestyle? Orthodox Christianity is not factored in. Does belief in God, or in the efficacy of prayer, cut across gambling ideology or performance at any level? Any good book stimulates questions for further reflection and research. There can be no doubt that Gambling Life stands on its own as a successful and coherent analysis of gambling in Greek life.

Maureen Mahon has written an eloquent ethnography that adds to a limited but growing rebuttal of monolithic and essentialist representations of people of African descent, in general, and of Black cultural production, in particular (capitalization of Black here follows the lead of Nikki Giovanni [Racism 101, William Morrow, 1994]). Right to Rock focuses on the Black Rock Coalition (BRC), founded in 1985 as a network of African American musicians “sick and tired of being sick and tired” (p. 14; an apt aphorism from Civil Rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer) from the frustration of racial segregation within the music industry. In fact, it is currently one of the few ethnographies that offer professors a text to include in syllabi that departs from routine social science stereotypes that “highlight the distressed-poor, the drug-addled, the violent, the highly sexed, the long-suffering, the religiously devout, the good-time partyers, and, occasionally thrown in for variety, the middle-class professional” (p. 8).

Anchored by an analysis of aesthetics, racial authenticity, and racial identity, Mahon carefully foregrounds the middle-class values of the “post-liberated generation” who came of age during the Black Power and the anti-Vietnam War movements while listening to the soundtracks of an eclectic mix of protest music and rock as well as blues, soul, and jazz. This is a generation raised by ambitious parents who emphasized education and the acquisition of cultural capital, a prerequisite for upward mobility in a country that still judges people by the color of their skin. Not surprisingly, many of the founding members of the BRC belong to the first wave of Black students who integrated white private and elite public schools yet often lived in predominantly Black neighborhoods. The strength and frustration of this experience, which resonates with my own, was confronting the persistent challenge of both white and Black stereotypes of authentic blackness—a paradigm promoted by insidious racialization that equates the middle class with whiteness and social deviance with blackness.

Mahon incisively identifies the dialectic of miscegenation and segregation in the music industry, a topic succinctly addressed by Kobena Mercer in his seminal article, “Black Hair/Style Politics” (New Formations, 1987:33–54), which Mahon cites in her bibliography. The political economy of apartheid in music and fashion, performance and style, has historically been marked by a sequence of innovation, imitation, and appropriation. As Mahon makes clear, the choice of language—the politics of naming—“Black Rock” was a strategic gesture that deliberately underlines the paradox of essentialism. “By the time BRC was founded in 1985, the white appropriation of rock was so complete that it was counterintuitive to imagine blacks playing rock at all. The interplay of miscegenation, segregation and appropriation had so muted rock’s blackness that black musicians had to insist that they had the right to rock” (p. 148). Black artists (in this case, musicians, but similar preconceptions register across the performing and visual arts as well as in the media, business, academy, and everyday life) are in an incessant struggle against cultural gatekeepers who dictate racial and aesthetic categories, determining genres and access to resources, including opportunity and promotion. Unfortunately, as Mahon’s interviewees note, gatekeepers are not only white: Sometimes the keys to Black prisons are held by other Blacks in an industry comfortable with neat racial categories and still lacking Blacks in top decision-making positions. Not surprisingly, Spike Lee, a member of this generation, and his film, Bamboozled (New Line, 2000), come easily to mind. In this general context, strategic essentialism remains an indispensable tool for asserting Black cultural identities as inherently diverse because they are shaped by the common experience of racism and corollary double-consciousness eloquently elaborated by W. E. B. Du Bois at the end of the 19th century.

Mahon concludes her ethnography with a chapter on Jimi Hendrix, the catalyst for her project and the key symbol for BRC members. Hendrix was “simultaneously locked into and locked out of certain images and practices,” “a consequence of the music industry’s political economy and assumptions about black authenticity [which shaped] the ways black and white audiences and critics responded to him” (p. 235). But the reclamation of Hendrix as a Black rocker (p. 232) is a uniquely U.S. American phenomenon, given the reality that respect for the artistic freedom of Black musicians as musicians is taken for granted in the international arena. This is particularly the case in the United Kingdom, where white musicians have always acknowledged their debt to their African American predecessors without relying on racial stereotype and prescriptive racialized genres (at least, and until, hip hop and the deliberate commodification of blackness).

Right to Rock is a timely and excellent choice for use in classes in cultural anthropology and cultural studies, American studies, and music. It is also a valuable resource for professors and students interested in an interdisciplinary approach that integrates theory into a rich ethnography with an approach that elevates the discussion of the relationship between race, gender, and class and their mutual impact on aesthetic representations and cultural productions.

Danny Kaplan's book on Israeli conscripts who, after three years of military duty, emerged from their service as mature gay men offers an absorbing look at the consequences of maintaining a stigmatized sexual orientation in a most inhospitable social environment. This is not an ordinary ethnographic work. Kaplan, a psychologist by training, did not observe his subjects during their army service. Instead, he conducted in-depth interviews with gay men who had just completed their active military duty. The series of eight eloquently narrated life histories drawn from the larger pool of interviewees details their narrators' survival strategies in that citadel of Israeli machismo. It reveals a pattern of compartmentalization between the men’s inner, hidden erotic attraction and their public behavior and display of sexual identity.

Kaplan's interviewees did not describe their days in the army as a time of suffering. On the contrary, they generally managed to integrate successfully into their units, both in combat and social situations. They appear to have built mental and emotional barriers against the sexual temptation inherent in living closely in the company of attractive men. Kaplan argues, however, that the long army service was ultimately instrumental in leading his subjects, shortly before their return to civilian life, into the liberating and final stage of "coming out." Turning to the theoretical legacy of Victor Turner, Kaplan writes, “It is intriguing that so many of the interviewees began that process [of coming out] when they were still within the confines of their service, often at the very last stretch. . . . What may be at work here is a cultural state of liminality—an unstable position occurring in the rite of passage from one normative social structure to another" (p. 157).

The men in Kaplan’s study are generally drawn from the more well-off, better-educated, secular sectors of Israeli society. They also volunteered to participate in his research. To what extent that record of painless army experience and safe passage to gay identity applies to gay recruits from less comfortable social backgrounds is difficult to conclude from this work.

The field of gay and lesbian studies is new in the Israeli academic tradition. Israeli anthropologists had avoided a subject that seemed threatening in their small-scale, relatively intimate society, in which family life, marriage, and children have constituted basic societal values since the days of its founding. Readers of this review, then, will not be surprised to learn that I conducted my own research on gay life in New York City. Kaplan's book is a most rewarding project and an indication of a new era in the landscape of homosexuality research in Israel.

Many of the 16 articles in this collection are from the conference on “Male Friendship and Homosociality in Latin America” held at Brown University in April 2001. The goals of the volume, broadly, are two: (1) to make scholarship on men and masculinities by Latin American specialists who most typically write to and for a Latin American audience available to non–Latin American scholars (this includes translating some of the essays into English for this volume) and (2) “to extend feminist theory and gender studies in Latin America in new directions” (p. ix). The editor, Matthew Gutmann, notes in the introduction that the volume attempts to provide much needed insight into “men-as-men” in Latin America (p. 1) while grounding the research within gender–sexuality analytic tools. Within the larger goals of the volume, Gutmann highlights three areas of particular concern; these include an interrogation by various authors of the connection between local and global changes in gender and sexuality, whether any aspect of gender and sexuality among Latin American men is “typical and/or sui generis” (p. 2), and the merits of studying men rather than studying gender–sexuality (in Latin America or anywhere). Although these three issues are implicitly addressed in many of the chapters, the first (the issue of the relationship of local and global changes on gender and sexuality) receives the most attention.

Throughout the volume, the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” (as evident in dominant male ideological expressions, e.g., of homophobia, machismo, and misogyny [p. 3]) is used as a means to rethink the complexities of normative versus practical (and actual) gendered behavior across various settings and contexts. Indeed, this volume is to be commended for the interrogation of mundane, taken-for-granted situations focusing on men but examined through an analytic lens of gender–sexuality. The men highlighted in this volume range from what we in the United States might call “deadbeat dads” to “philanderers” (Claudia Fonseca), “soldiers” (Peter Beattie), and “Mr. Mom wannabes” (José Olavarría). Moreover, the volume covers much geographical territory, including Brazil, urban Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Argentina. Rather than focusing only on homosexual, minority, or other marginalized men (which is often typical of men’s studies), this volume provides a much-needed example for others specializing in men and masculinities and gender–sexuality studies by focusing on men in various stages of their lives and across a range of classes and ethnicities.

After the introduction by Gutmann, the volume showcases one of its strongest articles in chapter 2; this chapter by Mara Viveros Vigoya (translated by Gutmann and María Elena García) makes a rich body of literature on Latin American gender and sexuality accessible to English speakers–readers. Vigoya situates the study of Latin American masculinities within the frameworks of (gender) scholarship by Latin American feminists, the history of men’s studies, and literature on masculinities. This chapter is indispensable for anyone studying masculinity/ies, in general, and Latin American gender–sexuality issues, in particular.

Fonseca’s contextually specific and nuanced article—“Philanderers, Cuckolds, and Wily Women: Reexamining Gender Relations in a Brazilian Working-Class Neighborhood”—is especially interesting not only for the topic and her entry into it (jokes and gossip) but also because she demonstrates through interviews and field observation the ways in which women view men’s behavior and judge it. Through this perspective, Fonseca shows the intricate ways in which hegemonic masculinity (and femininity, for that matter) is (re)produced inconsistently depending on (at least) two variables: (1) the blood relationship between the joker–gossiper and the object of the joke or gossip and (2) the actual effect the joking–gossip has on the individual’s life. This latter variable is especially noteworthy given that an examination of the actual impact that being the object of a joke or gossip has over an individual clearly demonstrates that power is not unidirectional; that is, depending on the context, as Fonseca shows, hegemonic masculinity (or gender norms, in general) can be rejected, subverted, and even ignored, potentially having little power over the assumed victim.

This volume adds greatly to the gender–sexuality and masculinity literature currently available. Although the articles cover a range of masculinities, the extent to which the men included in the volume represent normative men is not transparent to the non–Latin American specialist (such as this reviewer); nonetheless, the volume does well by implicitly questioning the notion of “normative” masculinity by providing rich, detailed ethnographic accounts of various styles of masculinities throughout Latin America.

As a graduate student in anthropology in the era of President Reagan’s talk of “winnable nuclear wars,” Hugh Gusterson was not too enthused by arcane discussions of kinship terminologies and totemic symbolism. He dropped out of his graduate program and headed to California, where the antinuclear movement was just beginning to gather momentum. A job on the staff of the Nuclear Freeze Campaign in San Francisco offered him the opportunity of getting involved with actors on both sides of the nuclear fence: the antinuclear protestors and the weapons designers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This experience renewed Gusterson’s interest in anthropology, focused this time not on distant, “other cultures” but on the tribe and culture of nuclear weapons scientists, and it led to his prolonged engagement as a participant-observer of the belief systems and rituals of nuclear weapons designers. The result has been a series of passionate and sophisticated articles and a highly influential earlier book, Nuclear Rites (University of California Press, 1996). In People of the Bomb, Gusterson continues his insightful and engaged analyses of the U.S. nuclear industrial complex.

Comprisingarticles previously published elsewhere, People of the Bomb represents Gusterson’s expansion of his existing interest in the U.S. nuclear establishment to the larger canvas of international security. He introduces the concept of “securityscapes” to add to the existing plethora of “scapes” generated after Arjun Appadurai’s coinage. “Securityscapes” are defined as “asymmetrical distributions of weaponry, military force, and military-scientific resources among nation-states and the local and global imaginaries of identity, power, and vulnerability that accompany these distributions” (p. 166). Deftly exploring the intricate interconnections between nuclear weaponry and the changing terrain of international relations, Gusterson deploys a critical constructivist and feminist perspective to provide insightful and reflexive analyses of a very wide range of issues. A chapter on the lifeworld of Sylvia, the Japanese American weapons scientist whose aunt was a victim of the Hiroshima bomb and whose father was interned by the U.S. state, provides a nuanced understanding of her motivations and beliefs. In a scintillating essay on the largely staged hysterical reactions to nuclear tests in India and Pakistan, Gusterson introduces the concept of “nuclear orientalism” to deftly dissect the explicit racial overtones of the manner in which the issue was discussed in the U.S. media. He accomplishes this without giving up his antiproliferation position. A chapter that describes watching and discussing the movie Short Circuit (John Badham, dir, Twentieth Century Fox, 1986) with Ray, a nuclear weapons scientist, provides Gusterson with the opportunity to reflect on the dynamics of how the same text can be open to mutually opposed interpretations. He takes Samuel Huntington’s absurd cultural determinism sharply to task in yet another lively essay. As a card-carrying anthropologist, Gusterson had long bemoaned the lack of attention to culture in studies of international conflict and security. What he had not expected was the total reification and ossification of the concept of “culture” in the hands of Huntington. In a chapter titled “The Death of the Authors of Death,” he reflects on the irony of scientists engaging in research the results of which will never be published. In discussing the movement to prevent the construction of a nuclear incinerator at Livermore, Gusterson provides a detailed account of the nuts and bolts of the strategies for challenging expert discourses on risk. One of the most riveting essays in this collection happens to be the brief postscript. Here Gusterson examines some of the factors underlying the dramatic shifts in the discourse of nuclear weapons that led up to the scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and to the real possibility of a new nuclear arms race.

A brief book review like this one is obviously totally insufficient to even hint at the value and significance of this important collection. In People of the Bomb, Gusterson has accomplished the remarkable feat of deploying the ideas of a very wide range of social theorists to illuminate critical issues in a text that is accessible to readers outside the card-carrying anthropological community. More often than not, critical analyses of significant issues are couched in arcane theoretical discourse designed to impress tenure committees. Gusterson does not view social theory as primarily a tool for self-enjoyment, nor does he believe in constructing purely political rants. He succeeds in striking an appropriate balance among theory, empirical analysis, and political passion. People of the Bomb is an outstanding book in which Gusterson’s formidable anthropological imagination is on display. He emerges as a major public intellectual in the tradition of C. Wright Mills.