The sugar industry has been a component of the Philippine economy for a long time, and it continues to play a significant, even if declining, role in the country today. Billig’s study is a skilled account of the industry from an anthropological perspective. Four elements are combined in this study. First, Billig analyzes the industry from the point of view of its elite players: planters, millers, traders, food exporters, and government officials. Second, he shows how Philippine culture is reflected in this elite. Third, he addresses the manner in which his own fieldwork highlights the conflict between the industry’s elite groups. Finally, the author argues that to understand the conflict between the elites, their respective cultural underpinnings—in term of meanings, values, and intentions—need to be uncovered. Billig is successful in the first three efforts; in the latter, I believe, he is less convincing.

The author begins by tracing the industry’s development from the early–19th century Spanish period into the American colonial phase during which it became dependent on access to the American market, a condition that has continued to today. Billig then discusses the inefficiencies currently existing in the industry, which are perpetuated by the U.S. quota system and uncertainties about the impact of land reform programs. Inefficiencies are also the result of a property system introduced during the American period when it made sense; that is, the quedan arrangement in which sugar milled by centrals continues to be owned and then sold by the planters. Nowadays, the resulting second-order trade sector drives transaction costs up. Billig describes the contrasting attitudes individuals in the elite groups have about this impediment to improve efficiency. He adopts a similar approach when turning to the question of whether sugar should be allowed to be imported into the Philippines. It is in this context that the author in the early 1990s became involved in the conflict between the elite groups. Pro- and especially anti-import groups asked for his help to lobby the government. This lead to Billig’s termination of his research in central Philippines—ethically his position had become compromised and an element of danger had entered. The author then turns to the manner in which the concept of “rationalization” is used by the different parties in the industry to support their own position—suggesting that the concept’s meaning is culturally relative—and he shows how groupism is an integral part of the industry. This involves the cultural tendency among Filipinos to form ever changing groups around personalized leaders whose main concern is to defend their leadership position, rather than to represent substantive issues. Groupism has not helped the effectiveness of the Filipino dominated industry versus other interests in the Philippines. Among these are local Chinese—culturally urban, commercial, and innovative—who are beginning to enter and transform the industry.

Billig adheres to a neo-Weberian economic anthropology, which emphasizes “causal eclecticism” and the study of “meaningful social action in order to understand what motivates people” (pp. 6–7). To him, culture is important even in utilitarian action, although he avoids culturology as an all-embracing explanation. Billig is moderate in his approach, but he does argue strongly against the “the apriorist, formalist, rationalist, nomothetic, universalistic approach” as represented by current economic thought (p. 269) that regards humans as “rational maximizers of utility” (p. 224). The problem I have is not so much with the author’s argument but, rather, with its applicability to the case under consideration. The underlying principle of classical economics, something that goes back to Adam Smith, is that people act according to their self-interest. When discussing the quedan and import issues, rather than seeing the various pro and con positions taken by the elite parties as expressions of different cultural orientations, as the author does, these positions can be considered more parsimoniously as expressions of the self-interest each group has because of its place in the industry. Planters, of course, are against sugar imports and for the quedan system because both protect their inefficient operations, even if the overall efficiency of the industry then suffers. The fact that they defend the quedan system, for instance, by invoking the cultural “idiom of masculinity” (p. 131) is interesting, but hardly the significant factor to understand their position. Similar points can be made with respect to the other elite groups. It is curious how the cultural orientation of each group—their interpretation of what is “rational” (p. 224)—tends to correspond with their economic/political self-interest. It would have been better for the author to have shown that “rational,” “self-interest” and similar etic concepts need to be culturally fleshed out, instead to imply that culture supersedes them. As it stands, the greatest utility of the culture concept in this study is when Billig deals with the Filipino penchant for groupism and describes the character of Chinese business ways. To add a final note, given that the culture/economy issue is a central theme of the study, it is surprising that the author does not mention economic anthropologists who have recently written about the issue, such as J. M. Acheson, S. Gudeman, R. H. Halperin, and R. R. Wilk.

Despite these critical remarks, anyone interested in the sugar industry, in general, and the one in the Philippines, in particular, will find Billig’s work an insightful, sensitive, and balanced study. It stands as a significant contribution to industrial and Philippine ethnography.

In this clearly written and extensively detailed ethnography, Yunxiang Yan explores issues of intimacy, love, and youth culture in contemporary China. Recent writings in the popular press and in some academic circles have tended to treat these issues as a largely metropolitan preoccupation. Implicitly writing against this oversight, Yan shows how desires for youth autonomy, individual agency, and emotional expression are not simply the purview of the new young hipsters who hang out in Starbuck’s, frequent expensive nightclubs, or spend their days chatting on the Internet in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. These desires and the social changes they have unleashed have made their way into family life in China’s rural villages. And yet, as Yan goes to some lengths to argue, these desires and changes are not simply the effect of the recent capitalist transformation of China. Youth autonomy, desires for independence, and the quest to be liberated once and for all from the “ancestors’ shadow” (p. 218) owe as much to the history of Chinese socialism as they do to the economic reforms that began in earnest in China in the early 1980s.

Yan’s historical ethnography takes place in a village in southern Heilongjiang Province called Xiajia. Those familiar with Yan’s first book on Xiajia, The Flow of Gifts, published in 1996, will know that the author lived there as a young man between 1971and 1978. Many years later he returned to Xiajia to conduct his doctorate research. He returned again, making seven different field trips to Xiajia between 1989 and 1999. This long-term engagement with Xiajia provided Yan with deep personal relations with villagers and government officials and access to household registration records and birth planning files. Whereas The Flow of Gifts focused primarily on how human sentiment, as opposed to instrumental concerns, shaped gift giving, Private Life under Socialism focuses on the emergence of individualism in what Yan calls the “private spaces” of social life, especially the family. To make his case, Yan conducted informal and formal interviews with many of Xiajia’s approximately 1,500 residents and followed the lives of more than two dozen individuals. Writing in the first person for much of the book, Yan gracefully brings many of these individuals to life. Readers experience them as subjects searching for a better life, but also as complicated persons. Many of them express contradictory moral positions, as they attempt to make sense of the history of collectivism, the sexual mores of elders, the ostentatious consumer behavior of neighbors, and even the reasons behind the suicide of a fellow villager. Most poignantly, Yan paints a picture of the elderly in Xiajia, especially those from poorer families, living a life of near desperation; the positions of power they once enjoyed in the family and community are undermined by aggressive sons and their spouses, who now occupy the best domestic spaces in village households, spend family income on expensive new furniture and consumer goods, and ignore the pleas of the elderly for frugality and common sense. In short, the moral world of the elderly, once grounded in and supported by the collective practices of socialism, has become anachronistic in a world in which consumption practices and individual autonomy have emerged as the new logics of social and family life.

Yan’s task is not simply to provide a detailed ethnographic account of Xiajia; he is also interested in taking on the Western anthropological tradition that has tended to view the Chinese family as the entry point to any understanding of Chinese social life. He, thus, intersperses individual reflections and his own observations of weddings, funerals, public displays of affection, family disputes, and so on, with a critical treatment of the images and theories of collective behavior and corporate rationality that have long defined the study of the Chinese family. This, in fact, is the main theoretical focus of the book: to show how the “Xiajia case demonstrates the increasingly important role played by the individual in the transformation of private life, which has by and large been overlooked in previous studies that relied on the corporate model of the Chinese family” (p. 219). Given that much of the book focuses on the rearrangement of domestic spatiality under the reforms and its effects on both village youth and the elderly, one might reasonably assume that Yan is drawing a sharp historical line between the collective and postcollective periods. He eschews this interpretation. Although this argument for the lack of a clear-cut historical rupture is not as thoroughly documented as one would like, Yan argues that almost everything that has taken place in family life in Xiajia since the early 1980s has its roots in the early stages of socialist practice. In the 1950s, for example, the Chinese Communist Party took the project for family reform (which began in many urban centers as far back as the 1930s and 1940s) to the grassroots. The party linked family reform to other aspects of socialist transformation (collectivization, rural industrialization, the recruitment of women into positions of power in the socialist state apparatus) and began the process of parental disempowerment and disenfranchisement that eventually emerged full force in the 1980s and 1990s.

Given his long personal and professional engagement in Xiajia village, readers should not be surprised that Yan does not remain entirely neutral in his views of the astonishing changes that have come to this particular place. On the one hand, I like how Yan reveals, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, his distaste for ostentatious consumerism, the reckless disrespect for parents and elders, and the production of what he calls the “uncivil individual.” And yet, on the other hand, his moral passion is never fully transformed into any kind of political vision. As readers, we never really learn what he thinks about the history of socialism in general and the rise of market capitalism, for example. Nor do we get a political reading on the development of the extreme egotism and concomitant lack of any sense of civic duty among village youth. We get good, old-fashioned anthropological concern for worlds transformed, and we get moral distaste. We get little sense of where the author thinks Xiajia should go from here: A return to the socialist past? Back to prerevolutionary social orders in which the young respected and deferred to the old? Or forward into a more morally and ethically based capitalist future, if such a thing is even possible? In the end, as we move through this rich, sometimes riveting, and often depressing account of private life under socialism and beyond, we get no sense of the question on many a mind in China: What now is to be done?

For the last ten years, Unni Wikan has publicly campaigned to convince the Norwegian government to reform its welfare policies and multiculturalist practices directed at immigrant populations. She has written newspaper editorials, served as an expert witness in court proceedings, and testified before various government commissions. In 1995 she sent shock waves through polite Norwegian society by publishing a book-length study that concluded that the state's policies of cultural respect and financial generosity toward the country’s immigrant and refugee inhabitants were effectively betraying the latter, abetting ethnic ghettoization, creating welfare dependence, and destroying self-respect. Generous Betrayal is both a translation of this argument for an international audience and a travelogue of the author's odyssey in becoming a public intellectual.

The empathic attention to voices of those who often fall through the cracks of policy and scholarly representation characteristic of Wikan's earlier ethnographic work shines through in this account. Wikan recounts the tragic life histories of young Norwegian citizens of immigrant background who are victimized by their families and by state agencies chartered to help them. The heartrending tales of the pseudonymous Aisha and Nadia—Norwegian–Middle Eastern girls kidnapped by their parents and "deported" abroad for forced marriages—serve as recurrent props for Wikan's political and theoretical conclusions. They illustrate how Norwegian state immigration policies, along with powerful spokesmen within the immigrant community who reify normative interpretations of cultural and religious practice for personal gain can destroy those less capable of making themselves heard. They poignantly exemplify the imbrications of culture and power that anthropologists have been theorizing for 20 years and that Wikan concisely presents here to a larger public (pp. 75–88).

In criticizing how culture has become a "new concept of race" (p. 79) and the object of a violent identity politics in Norway, Wikan follows certain liberal European intellectuals in positing antinomies between community and individual, cultural respect and human rights, tolerance and humanism, and ethnic diversity and liberal democracy (pp. 139–170). Viewing these oppositions as zero-sum rather than as standing in dynamic and productive tension, she argues that prioritizing cultural difference destroys individual dignity, equality, and freedom. Citing the ways Aisha and Nadia's pleas were ignored by child welfare agencies who favored family reunification on grounds of cultural compatibility, she accuses the Norwegian state of "engaging in a modern form of sacrifice, this one being performed on the altar of culture" (p. 24).

But if Wikan unpacks the "culture" of state multicultural policies—demonstrating how it totalizes internal diversity and masks hegemonic relations (pp. 83–88)—she does not extend the same deconstruction to the "human" of humanism or the "individual" in the Enlightenment categories of freedom and equality she prioritizes. Humans become human only insofar as they live within social worlds. Their individuality is a social project, the result not just of singular life experiences but also of processes of subjectification that create racialized European nations, that, regardless of official state discourse, contribute to the exclusions and durable inequalities faced by immigrant populations. Not recognizing these structural conditions of exclusion slants Wikan's arguments against the very immigrant community whose members are marginalized for not being white, Protestant Norwegians.

Unsympathetic readers might reasonably accuse Wikan of engaging in a racist polemic, of being an apologist for anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim politics. Overall, the book tends to portray immigrants as lazy, criminally inclined, mostly illiterate men who steal welfare benefits and violently repress their daughters' and sisters' life chances. To criticize the book in this way, however, would be, according to Wikan, to participate in a "conspiracy of silence" (p. 11 and passim) that victimizes young women and abets the creation of an ethnic underclass. Researchers’ fears of being accused of racism, Wikan recounts, have impeded the qualitative and quantitative studies necessary to evaluate and reform state policy.

Certain immigrants have successfully learned to navigate through Norway's welfare and refugee admittance bureaucracy. To portray this as "reap[ing] the fruits of a welfare system to which [they] had contributed nothing" (p. 21) is to misrepresent the struggles most immigrants and refugees engage in to survive. For U.S. readers, Wikan's demands to overhaul "welfare colonialism" (p. 7) recall Reagan-era reforms that augmented homelessness, drug dependency, and the prison population, making the truly disadvantaged even more so.

Wikan's use of tragic cases of young victims of immigration regimes as morality tales is ultimately no more valid as an analytical methodology than citing success stories. Both are partial truths in a far more complex social reality. In using these cases to question the unintended personal and political consequences of a reified anthropological notion of "culture," Wikan does a service to the field. In using them politically, she engages in a further form of exploitation.

Lillian Trager has written a fascinating account of the concept of the “hometown” among the Ijesa Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and of how important that connection to “home” may be for the formation of local community and identity as well as for advancing community development. The author undertook this research from 1991 to 1998, a time of considerable political change and economic crisis in Nigeria at the national level. A study of the mobilization and relative effectiveness of grassroots development in the context of disarray at the level of the state adds an important piece to our understanding of many contemporary African puzzles.

Trager begins her story with a description of a recently invented tradition of village “community-day celebrations.” These rituals are not only designed to reinforce themes of unity and group identity around a common “hometown” but are also directed at the very concrete goal of raising money for particular projects like digging wells and building community halls.

Are these rituals effective models for promoting development? Trager cautions that, although the Ijesa Yoruba are exhibiting a model of development that many observers have pointed to as preferable to a top-down, government- or outside aid–directed model, it is not without problems. Despite incorporating such “feel-good” concepts as indigenous knowledge and institutions and participatory development, there are real limits to how much such grassroots efforts can achieve. First, they are subject to differences of interests within these communities, whether along lines of gender, wealth, and residence at home or away or within these categories. Second, self-acknowledged limits exist to how much local communities can achieve on their own without any government assistance. Before outside-aid officials get too excited by “grassroots development,” they would be well served by reading Trager’s analysis.

Keeping alive a strong connection to one’s hometown (usually a kinship link through the father’s lineage) and mobilizing resources might be particularly challenging among the highly mobile Yoruba, who may never have actually lived in their ancestral villages. Trager explores the many benefits Yoruba migrants may continue to gain from their hometowns, including very tangible flows of resources (whereas money may primarily flow back home, food may be transferred to the migrant, and people flow both ways) as well as the social and emotional benefits that may flow from cultural and social networks. Entry into politics, for example, may depend on a strong hometown connection. Yoruba people are “joiners,” in Trager’s view, and the new associations provide an additional forum for expressing group solidarity.

This reviewer was particularly interested, as well, by Trager’s discussion of politics and the place of hometown associations in Nigerian political life of the 1990s. That decade was one of considerable political repression and chaos, and Trager does a particularly skillful job of summarizing the experience of political shifts at the local level and how that may have changed the position of the associations. Babangida, who took control by government coup in 1985 and held power until 1993, for example, tried to ban ethnically based associations as threats to “national unity.” Although the government was primarily concerned about larger regional groups like pan-Yoruba associations, the threat from local associations remained clear and ethnic divisions and tensions increased throughout the country. Did these hometown associations retreat into a more local platform and contribute to the civil, rather than the political, society of Nigerian life during the nineties and beyond? The answer is appropriately complex and points to the associations’ continued efforts at political lobbying and influencing regional and national politics while also opening up space for political debate and participation at the very local level. But even there, Trager reminds readers, not all is unity and harmony, and conflict and its resolution remain a constant.

This study is rich in primary data and ethnographic depth and nuance. Trager’s long-term involvement with Nigeria is clearly evident in the multilayered and rich texture of the study. My only criticism is that she did not build on this work to consider some of the wider, more comparative implications of processes of migration, development, and political change. As the Ijesa Yoruba struggle to prosper in an increasingly chaotic economic and political landscape, so, too, do many others in so many other parts of the world. Given Trager’s firm control over this one case study, widening her lens could have been very illuminating.

Crude Chronicles is one of the best ethnographies of Latin America written in the past decade. Suzana Sawyer’s account demonstrates the usefulness—indeed, the necessity—of ethnography for understanding politics. Simply put, Sawyer was there—whether there was a street protest, the occupation of a government office, a long protest march in the Andes, or high-level meetings between state officials, oil executives, and indigenous leaders. As a result of this sustained involvement, Sawyer’s contribution is far more than an ethnography of an indigenous movement. It is an ethnography of the most important political forces shaping Latin America during the past quarter century: the politics of indigenous rights, identity, corporate power, neoliberalism, land, the nation-state, globalization, and the environment.

With remarkable consistency, Sawyer seamlessly weaves herself and her ethnographic accounts into a larger story about neoliberalism, oil, and indigenous politics. Again and again, Sawyer is in the right place at the right time. The result is a fine-grained treatment of one of the most important indigenous movements in Latin America and its struggles with multinational oil and the Ecuadorian state.

Each chapter begins with an ethnographic description of a particular political encounter. The varied nature of these encounters provides for an engaging read and allows Sawyer to highlight the complicated process through which neoliberalism, capital accumulation, and oppositional political movements interact and constitute each other.

Chapter 1 begins with a 1992 indigenous protest march from the Amazonian lowlands to Quito, Ecuador’s capital. The march, organized by OPIP (Organization of Indigenous People of Pastaza), was in support of indigenous land rights, but it engendered debates about the capacity of the Ecuadorian state to control “progress,” foreign capital, and political opposition. How, and by whom, is the Ecuadorian nation defined? Indigenous opposition was ultimately contained in this instance, but the march helped carve a space for indigenous peoples within the nation by forcing the state to recognize their unique relationship to the land.

Chapter 2 explores attempts by a multinational company to marginalize indigenous opposition to oil interests by garnering state power, positioning itself as the harbinger of modernity, and creating divisions within indigenous groups. One of the strengths of this chapter, and of the book in general, is Sawyer’s refusal to sanitize indigenous politics. Crude Chronicles does have a David and Goliath quality. Indigenous groups possess few resources when compared with ARCO, for example, a multinational whose “economy” is almost double that of the Ecuadorian nation. Yet Sawyer pays close attention to divisions among indigenous groups while taking readers inside the multinational itself. This approach identifies wonderfully complex actors whose motivations, strategies, and actions cannot be mechanically read from their “economic interests.”

The third chapter starts with an indigenous occupation of the Ministry of Energy and Mines. Throughout the book, the Ecuadorian state is situated within (and formed by) the struggle between multinational oil and Amazonian peoples. As the Ecuadorian state seeks to seduce foreign investment and as indigenous peoples are forced to confront privatization, deregulation, liberalization, and decentralization, a crisis of state and nation is provoked, opening up certain political spaces while closing off others.

Chapter 4 takes the reader into meetings between indigenous groups, oil executives, and officials from the Ministry of Energy and Mines. Sawyer, acting as translator for OPIP, is the proverbial fly on the wall, providing a rare look into the process by which state and corporate actors depoliticize the practice of the petroleum industry by attempting to reduce wide-ranging and complex problems to a series of technical fixes.

Chapters 5 and 6 take readers from boardroom to jungle and back again. In response to neoliberal agrarian legislation, indigenous peoples in the Amazon and elsewhere blocked roads and paralyzed Ecuador for over a week in 1994. Although the immediate point of contention revolved around land, the broader issue concerned the place of indigenous peoples within the Ecuadorian polity. The power of the protest, in turn, forced the Ecuadorian state to debate the newly passed Agrarian Development Law with a wide range of groups, including indigenous leaders. Here, again, Sawyer takes readers inside these meetings to examine a neoliberal project that allows the state to relinquish responsibility for its subjects while reducing its role to one of “fiscal responsibility.”

In the end, readers are left with a wonderfully rich, fluid, and revealing account. I highly recommend Crude Chronicles for anthropologists and others interested in indigenous politics, neoliberalism, oil, the environment, development, social movements, and the nation-state.

While she was conducting research in Biak, located in the Papuan borderlands that mark the easternmost reaches of the Indonesian nation, Danilyn Rutherford often found herself in the odd position of being welcomed back by people whom she had never met, as if her arrival had been long expected. The people of Biak, she learned, were no strangers to the foreign. After centuries during which they had successively paid tribute to distant sultans, fallen under the Netherlands' colonial rule, been subjected to Japanese occupation and the battles of World War II, and been forcibly incorporated by the Indonesian state, the foreign had become as much a part of their society as any home-grown cultural forms. Biaks prided themselves on their cosmopolitanism, boasting of high literacy rates and fluency in Indonesian, the national language; Christianity had become thoroughly entrenched in local life.

It is their relationship to the idea of the foreign, and how it shaped Biaks' responses to Indonesian rule and other sources of external authority, that forms the backbone of this book. A remarkable ethnography of a remarkable place, Raiding the Land of the Foreigners challenges the idea that political integration into the nation-state inevitably leads to the hegemony of national ideologies and identities. Despite the apparent enthusiasm with which many Biaks participated in the institutions of the Indonesian nation-state under the long-lived Suharto regime, Rutherford argues that a distinctive relationship with the foreign as a source of prestige, power, and value allowed Biaks to engage fully in these institutions without subscribing to what might be called an Indonesian national consciousness. The value of such participation lay in its ability to enhance the status of Biak individuals (and, by extension, their kin) who could claim the status of "foreigners" through their visible roles as representatives of the Indonesian state or other "foreign" sources of power. A resident of Biak, then, could proudly wear the uniform of a civil servant and at the same time express contempt for national ideologies. The failure of Indonesian hegemony may also help to explain the support for the Papuan nationalist movement that has swept the region since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998.

Rutherford does not simply assert the lack of fit between the borders of the nation-state and the reach of its cultural domination; neither does she leave the category of "the foreign" as an abstract idea. She elucidates in detail how this category, as a distinctly Biak concept, has been produced through the interaction of particular historical trajectories and sociocultural dynamics. The strength of this book lies in its deep, nuanced investigation of the discursive logics that underlie Biak society and ways of life, and of the historical processes that led to what Rutherford calls "the fetishization of the foreign." Based on an extended period of fieldwork in the 1990s, several return visits, and a year of archival research and interviews conducted in the Netherlands, the author weaves together an intricate but coherent study that encompasses Biak kinship and exchange relations, millenarian movements, Christianization, local myths and genres of performance, prestige systems, and political culture. These diverse social fields are shown to be linked to each other in a larger "sociocultural economy," that is, "an interconnected series of spaces of representation, appropriation, and production, whose reproduction rests on a dialectic in which social action is both oriented by and recreates cultural values" (p. 4).

Ethnography and theory go hand in hand here; the book is as theoretically rigorous, well informed, and insightful—often brilliant—as it is ethnographically rich. Through the details of ethnography (enhanced, I might add, by moments of warmth and humor), readers come to understand the significance of Rutherford's theoretical treatment of her subject. She offers a provocative critique of the notion that modernity and the processes associated with it (such as nationalism, bureaucratization, or Christianization) necessarily usher in a radical rupture in local subjectivities and understandings. Where she might have expected to find rupture in Biak, she often found continuity, but those continuities were more the product of a long-standing engagement with the outside world than of any stubborn adherence to an autochthonous tradition. The ability of Biaks to domesticate the foreign—including the national—by imbuing it with local meanings should be taken as an example of a larger set of possibilities that must be considered by those who study the transformations of modernity and national integration.

This is, in short, an original, masterful book that will be of great value not only to scholars of Southeast Asia and Melanesia but also to the discipline of anthropology as a whole.

In the preface to Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South, Celeste Ray explains that she had meant to write a different book, on the archaeology of Iron Age Europe. Fortunately for the anthropology of British diasporic populations, her project changed into a richly documented, long-term, multisited, regional analysis of the southern Scottish heritage movement. Centered on the Cape Fear Valley of North Carolina, home of the largest settlement of Highlanders in the United States, the study deals not only with the heritage of the approximately 20,000 Highlanders who settled in North Carolina before the American Revolution but also with that of subsequent waves of settlers from other Scottish regions, as well.

Rejecting the influential view that Euro-American ethnicity is generally in decline, Ray contends that her consultants claim Scottish or Celtic identity, distinct from and contrasting with Anglo-Saxon identity. The Scottish heritage movement celebrates a merger of "historical incidents, folk memories, selected traditions, and often sheer fantasy to interpret a past in a form meaningful for a particular group or individual at a particular point in time" (p. 7). The movement encompasses both participants with "a deep transgenerational awareness of their heritage" (p. 12) and those who have reclaimed their identity. They participate in organizations and events throughout the year involving distinctive dress, food, and religious services, often reinforced and refreshed with transnational links to the Scottish homeland. Contrasting her work with that of ethnographers who, like Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, deconstruct the invention of tradition, Ray instead focuses on ways in which fictionalized histories and new rituals constitute a mythological charter connecting participants socially, historically, and geographically with the Scottish "clanscape."

Ray organizes analysis of the movement in seven chapters dealing with the construction of Scottish identity, the emergence of the revivalist heritage movement in Carolina, the appropriation of the family metaphor of the clan system, the reinterpretation of the Highland Games in the South, the importance of heritage pilgrimages to Scotland, the polyvocal image of the warrior Scot, and Scottish heritage as a revitalization movement. She traces the emergence of Highlandism as a focus for pan-Scottish identity, drawing on a convergence of themes: the Jacobite Risings, the defeat of the Highlanders at the Battle of Culloden (1746), the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and the modern development of clan tartans as symbols of family identity. “Heritage celebration" according to Ray, "focuses on Highland life prior to Culloden, employing symbols of Scottish identity developed one hundred years after Culloden” (p. 40). In the chapter on “Scottish Heritage and Revival in North Carolina,” Ray traces the history of the movement and shows how it incorporates diverse and unrelated threads of Scottish identity into a communitas, evident, for example, through the performance of 19th-century songs commemorating and mythologizing the Jacobite period. In the next chapter on the significance of the clan system for the genealogically fascinated Carolina Scots, she describes the clanscape of the Scottish Americans. The activities of the clan societies both widen the imagined community of Scottish Americans and focus it more sharply on standard images of Scottish heritage. Ray points out that many of the activities of the clan societies are those associated with revivalism: dancing, poetry recitation, and storytelling in celebration of past ways of life. In the following chapter, Ray describes another venue for the activity of clan societies, the southern Highland Games circuit, in which the distinctive athletic events, no longer the sole focus of the gatherings, create a rationale for transnational ties with Scotland. She extends the analysis of transnational flows in the next chapter on heritage tourism in Scotland and the connections between the Highland landscapes and those that “re-place” them in Carolina (p. 150). Ray’s penultimate chapter on “Warrior Scots” is particularly insightful. She shows that the warrior image, “shaped by historical biases rather than cultural continuities” (p. 180), connects the Highland way of life directly to "military defeat—a paradigm with which Southerners are well acquainted” (p. 154). Thus, Confederate and Scottish heritages draw on parallel mythologies, according to Ray, weaving together martyrdom, militarism, strong religious faith, attachment to place and kin, and distinct gender roles. In the conclusion, Ray tantalizingly but all too briefly sketches an interpretation of southern Scottish cultural heritage as a revitalization movement, “an intentional and organized attempt to create a more satisfying state of existence” (p. 207). This interpretation again places Ray at odds with the "decline of ethnicity" theorists and their dismissal of heritage interest as simple nostalgia.

Many of Ray's consultants read and commented on portions of the manuscript and gave permission to use their real names. Ray's theoretical inspiration, which serves her well, owes more to Erving Goffman, Victor Turner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony Wallace than to recent theorists of transnationalism and cultural hybridity. Lucid, accessible, and gracefully written, Ray's engrossing work sets a high standard for the ethnography of British and Celtic diasporas.

Threatening Anthropology is a timely and critically important book, given the Bush administration’s use of the war in Iraq to justify repressive legislation to erode U.S. citizens’ civil rights. Basing his work on 30,000 pages of government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), oral histories, archival documents, correspondence, and published sources, David Price should be admired for his unrelenting drive in amassing the data. For those not familiar with the FOIA, I strongly suggest reading Price’s appendix “On Using the Freedom of Information Act” (pp. 355–361). The process of filing a successful “FOIA” is painfully slow and can take more than a decade to complete. It is needlessly tedious, requires the knowledge of arcane government codes, is subject to multiple disclosure exemptions, routinely involves an extended appeal process, and, years later, the most dispassionate researcher cannot help but conclude that government agencies such as the FBI resist every single effort to release the most basic information that may or may not be of interest.

During the course of Price’s 12-year quest for government documents, he filed over 500 FOIA requests and over 250 appeals, and he “aggressively filed numerous administrative appeals” (p. 358). He also had the support of Senator Patty Murray and Congressman Brian Baird. Was all this necessary? In a word, yes. For instance, after waiting five years, Price was informed that the FBI had no records pertaining to anthropologist Gene Weltfish. After multiple appeals, and another wait of several years, he received 412 pages from FBI files about Weltfish. Given the inherent problems of filing FOIAs, Price concludes that the process is overseen by government agencies, for example, the FBI, that all too often exhibit a “sloppy standard of professionalism” (p. 356) . Price maintains the FBI’s “slip shod approach to fulfilling FOIA requests is a serious matter and merits the examination of a congressional oversight committee” (p. 356). Price’s perception of the FBI and the FOIA process is harsh and accurate. His experience obtaining records from various governmental agencies helps explain why readers will occasionally encounter sharp words in the text. Do not let this mislead you, however—Price’s tone may annoy some readers, but no one should question the factual material on which he bases his analysis. His research meets the highest standards possible, and he meticulously details the impact the Cold War had on U.S. anthropologists, anthropological theory, and the American Anthropological Association.

Price’s book is a particularly valuable contribution to the history of anthropology because he reveals an unknown side to that history. The story Price paints of the impact the Cold War had on anthropology is dark and depressing. Of the many appalling events discussed by Price, two incidents stand out: The first is the utter failure of the American Anthropological Association to take action when its members were under fire by various governmental agencies. A perfect example of the AAA’s refusal to protect its members was Richard Morgan’s firing from the Ohio State Museum. Despite many appeals to the AAA for help and the formation of a special investigative committee, Morgan was blacklisted and driven out of the discipline and the United States. The second is a long letter sent by George Peter Murdoch to J. Edgar Hoover that alleged that communists were attempting to take over the AAA. Murdoch’s poison pen letter will send a chill down many people’s spines. Murdoch specifically identified 12 scholars whom he suspected of being communists. For his efforts, a few months later Murdoch was appointed chair of the AAA’s Committee on Scientific Freedom, designed to investigate violations of academic freedom.

Price’s research into the Cold War era and the impact it had on activist anthropologists highlights a glaring weakness in the work of George Stocking and his acolytes, who dominate the U.S. historicist school—namely, their resistance to consider the intersection of political beliefs and academic scholarship. To date, historians of anthropology have not adequately explored the impact politics has had on the scholarship of major figures in the discipline, Oscar Lewis, Alexander Lesser, Bernhard Stern, and Leslie A. White, to name but a few. Laura Nader has noted that the depoliticalization of the history of anthropology was not accidental and has labeled this shortcoming the “phantom factor”—that is, our understanding of the past is apolitical. Like Price and Nader, I do not want to abandon historicism’s relativistic appreciation of time and place but, rather, inject it with an appreciation for the political variables involved in a given scholar’s career or the establishment of a theoretical construct. Not all scholars were politically driven, but some were, and one cannot understand their work without a nuanced view of politics. Given this, Price’s work represents a welcome and long overdue departure from the history of anthropology as presented by Stocking. It also represents a wake-up call to those interested in the discipline’s past and present. As such, I consider Price’s book to be the starting point for a more nuanced and politicized history of anthropology. His work, thus, lays the foundation for future studies and must be considered required reading for every anthropologist and scholar interested in anthropology’s past.

Leslie White (1900–75) was unquestionably one of the most important yet least understood figures of 20th-century anthropology. He evoked strong passions in both advocates and opponents, many of whom have written about him. William Peace has produced the first full-scale biography of this controversial figure, however, and it goes a long way toward elucidating the paradoxes (both apparent and real) in White's life and work. White's evolutionism, Peace notes, was the most radical early critique of Boasian anthropology, and although it went out of vogue even during White's lifetime, it changed the course of U.S. anthropology. An icon for the generation that came of age in the two decades after World War II and the guiding force behind the development of the powerful University of Michigan department, White ended his years isolated (though tended by some of his devoted former students), embittered, and alcoholic, meeting his death in a motel room with a much younger woman—an end his enemies might have envied.

Peace draws on extraordinarily rich sources, especially White's prodigious correspondence and the journals he kept for most of his life, some of which he unfortunately expurgated. (One can only regret the loss that future biographers will suffer in this electronic age.) Peace also mined White's field notes and his voluminous unpublished manuscripts, and he extended his research to many of the individuals with whom White was in contact, through both archival materials and interviews. A major discovery was White's extensive writings, from 1931 to 1945 under the pseudonym of John Steel, for the official organ of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). This lode yielded new insights into White's early and explicit Marxism and his conviction that anthropological theory could be used to address the ills of the world. White was later badly treated by the SLP, precipitating a break with the party. Given his politics, his disapproval of the 1960s activism that was so prominent on his own campus is curious.

Peace follows White's life story in search of explanations for the kind of anthropology he produced. Born to middle-class parents who subsequently divorced, White and his siblings were raised by their father on a farm in Kansas. He served in the Navy during World War I, an experience that awakened him to the evils of war and social injustice and threw into doubt the verities he had grown up with. His turn both to "revolutionism" and to social science took place during college years at Columbia. He went on to study anthropology at the University of Chicago, where his Ph.D. was held hostage to a departmental fissure. A brief encounter with the Menominee Indians sold him on fieldwork and (against his mentors' advice) he set off for Acoma, one of the most secretive of the pueblos. This was the beginning of 30 years of difficult, detailed ethnographic research on the Keresan pueblos—work that he did simultaneously with his seminal theoretical and political writings on evolutionism. White himself saw no contradiction between these endeavors.

White spent 40 years in the Michigan department, 25 of them as its chairman. Despite his inevitable influence on it, he always wanted to avoid its turning into a "school"; he sought diversity in the faculty and encouraged a democratic atmosphere unusual for academic departments of the time. Throughout the Michigan years, White fought his battle to bring evolutionism (and Lewis Henry Morgan) into anthropology, slaying Boasian dragons—single-handedly for a long time—in the harsh polemical style that earned him so many enemies. By the time of the Darwinian centennial in 1959, evolutionism was in the mainstream and he was vindicated, but he remained as combative as ever.

In tracing this trajectory, Peace effectively balances White's biography and his ideas, seeking connections between them and arguing that his anthropology cannot be understood apart from his political beliefs. Peace explores, to a greater extent than seen in most other biographies of anthropologists, the sociopolitical context of White's theories; he also tells of the price White paid for his ideas, first in attacks by the religious establishment and then in McCarthy-era FBI investigations. Although he clearly admires White (who died when Peace was in high school), he is careful to convey the unattractive aspects of White's personality and the extensive criticisms made of his work. The result is an illuminating portrait of a complex figure whose ideas were ahead of their time—one whose critical role in the recent history of anthropology has been too little appreciated as other theoretical currents have gained sway.

Edited volumes rarely succeed in going beyond the effectiveness of individual contributions. The success of an edited volume largely depends on the editor’s ability to provide an insightful introduction and a rigorous framework that encourages the reader to gain better insights from the volume as a whole than those afforded by individual contributions. Locating Capitalism in Time and Space, edited by David Nugent, is a very good example of a collection that succeeds in this regard.

The restructuring of the world economy since World War II has contributed to a “general and marked acceleration in the ‘globalization’ of material forces and cultural messages accompanied by equally strong countermovements in which ‘localism’ of multiple kinds have asserted themselves with great force” (p. vii). Encouraged by these observable processes, many scholars have heralded the advent of a new historical era, the understanding of which, it is argued, requires a new set of epistemological frameworks and new ethnographic imaginations and tools. In recent years, many anthropologists have focused their efforts on rethinking the ideas and concepts that constitute the very foundation of anthropology. Nugent, in his thought-provoking introduction, states that these tendencies more than anything else, “serve as mechanisms that simultaneously empower and delimit: they claim agency, creativity, and subjectivity for one’s reference group even as they disempower, objectify and ultimately dismiss other groups” (p. 2). This has largely distorted understanding of history and of the politics of anthropology, contributing to an intellectual stagnation that needs to be urgently addressed.

The objective of this volume is to address “two inter-related aspects of historical process and academic production” (page viii) with the hope of shedding critical light on the positivist intellectual histories that dominate anthropology and social sciences, in general. The 11 contributors weigh in and critically inform the ongoing debates related to the validity of viewing contemporary globalization as a qualitative rupture with the past and “seek to raise questions about the degree to which the scholarship of recent decades represents a qualitative break with that of the past (p. viii).

To achieve this goal, Nugent advances an approach that erodes the emphasis on the intimate relationship between knowledge and enlightenment and encourages a shift to an understanding of anthropology as a discipline emerging from the historical articulation of power and knowledge (p. 2). The focus is on exposing the “political processes that have allowed select dimensions of the past to be represented as ‘the past,’ while other dimensions of our history have been effaced from memory” (p. 3). The attempt therein is to advance a different approach to understanding the continuities and discontinuities in global political economic processes and to develop an alternate remembrance of the historical development of anthropology during the 20th century. In so doing, Nugent seeks to establish a “deeper history for an anthropology of the global arena than is currently acknowledged in the discipline’ (p. 3). The attempt is more fruitfully served when one reads William Roseberry’s contribution as an extension of the introduction. Roseberry’s critique (pp. 61–79) of a Eurocentered model of capitalist development provides a clear understanding of capitalism as a continuously emerging spatially and temporally defined set of relations that is not necessarily European or U.S. centered. The arguments presented by Nugent and Roseberry constitute a well-developed framework for the creative understanding of other contributions to the volume, which discuss the development of capitalism as evidenced in localized issues such as state and nation formation, ethnicity, and class and gender conflict in various parts of the world. Each essay has its individual strong points and, when read within the framework of Nugent’s introduction and Roseberry’s contribution, poses more critical and relevant questions that are crucial to address today. Additionally, Nugent’s extended discussion of the development of social sciences during the 20th century enables one to read new relevance into the ethnographic analysis evident in different contributions to the book.

Intellectual provocations such as those evidenced in this volume play a critical role as necessary irritants that lay bare the power structure that defines the intellectual landscape of anthropology. This volume has the potential to create the necessary environment for creative interaction between anthropology and the intellectual challenges posed by postcolonial studies.