In Music, Race and Nation: Múúsica Tropical in Colombia, Peter Wade provides a detailed study of the rise of múúsica tropical, or Costeñño music, in connection with racial and national identities and cultural hybridity along the coastal area of Colombia in South America. La Costa (the coast)–the area that includes the cities of Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Santa Marta–is characterized by ambiguity. According to Wade, it is “black, but also indigenous and white; it is poor and ‘backward’..., but [it] has also been a principal port of entry for ‘modernity’ into the country” (p. 39). The area has also been politically vocal and the central source of Colombia’s commercially and internationally successful Costeñño music. Three organizations played important roles in acquainting the country with the latest sounds and developing popular music as an urban form: two record companies--Discos Fuentes, founded in 1934 in Cartagena, and Discos Tropical, founded in 1945 in Barranquilla--and Colombia’s first radio station, La Voz de Barranquilla, opened in 1929.

To situate Costeñño music, Wade traces its origin to three 19th-century musical forms : porro (working-class music derived from flutes and drums of Amerindian origin and appropriated by the bourgeoisie); fandango (a collective dance music with drums and hand-clapping from Spain); and vallenato (accordion music). Traveling wind bands helped spread the three musical forms in the coastal and interior cities and provincial towns.

Although Wade finds it difficult to tie a musician’s class background to a specific musical form, he nevertheless acknowledges musicians such as Lucho Bermúúdez, Antonio Maríía Peññaloza, and Luis Sosa, whose band members had strong connections with the elite, middle, and lower class, respectively. The three musicians and their orchestras played a diversity of styles at a variety of venues, always slipping Costeñño music in with new arrangements. The theme of possible covert sexual relations between white men and black women began to appear in the lyrics in the mid- 20th-century. In fact, Camacho y Cano, a white Costeñño male, recorded such a song, “Por la Bajo,” in New York, which subsequently made its way along with other risquéé songs into clubs in Colombia patronized by the elite. Other lyrical themes were partying, drinking, and love. The process of creating new types of Costeñño music “was certainly mediated very heavily by the elite and by the middle-classes” (p. 105) because the music had “qualities which expressed the tensions between modernity and tradition, between blackness and whiteness, between the region as distinctive and as part of the nation in progress, and between sexual desire and moral propriety” (p. 105).

Wade attributes the real impact of Costeñño music to Lucho Bermúúdez and his Orquesta del Caribe, who played live porros for the first time in a new nightclub in downtown Bogotáá. To be accepted by the elite, Bermúúdez switched the band’s composition from mainly black musicians to musicians who were whiter in appearance. As Costeñño music infiltrated Bermúúdez’s orchestra and other popular orchestras, special radio programs began to be dedicated to promoting the music. Yet the racial identity of the Costeñño musicians varied, as exemplified by Bermúúdez, a light mestizo; Joséé Barros, a moreno (brown) singer and composer; and Antonio Peññaloza, a slightly darker moreno, or black. As a result, blackness in the popular Costeñño bands “was usually not very evident, but its shadow or possibility was always there, especially in the rhythm section” (p. 125).

Costeñño music sucessfully penetrated the consciousness of audiences in the interior of Colombia and won entry into elite urban entertainment circles. Yet, Bermúúdez and other musicians sometimes dealt with hostile reactions. In 1936, at the first Congress of Music in Ibaguéé, Daniel Zamudio, a composer and musicologist, issued a racial diatribe lumping Costeñño music with Cuban music as foreign, black, and threatening to national consciousness. Other writers bemoaned the impact of Mexican, Cuban, and North American jazz on Costeñño music, equating foreignness with blackness. Thus, Costeñño music was identified as black, foreign, vulgar, modern, and sexual. To counteract such racist and often derogatory commentaries, some Costeñño intellectuals, including the writers Manuel Zapata Olivella and Gabriel Garcíía Máárquez, argued that improved communications and internal and external migrations had created a crisis in ideas about Colombian identity. Costeñño musicians rose to the challenge by stating that certain musical styles needed to be nationalized to be widely accepted. For example, in his December 30, 1950, essay for Semana newspaper, Julio Torres, the leader of a vallenato group from the interior, said, “To despise the importance of popular music... is a critical absurdity. To exalt so-called classical music as suitable for the people and cultured minorities, is another sociological error. Art music does not have to forcibly exclude popular music, nor vice versa” (p. 133).

The elites were culturally oriented toward Europe and toward their regional cities of Bogotáá and Medellíín. Some viewed Costeñño music, with its underlying implications of blackness, asto be backward. On the other hand, the emerging middle class and lower class recognized the celebratory aspects of Costeñño music that reveled in the economic growth, industrialization, and modernization of Colombia during the 1930s and 1940s. Yet Costeñño music cannot be understood solely through a simplified binary opposition between the elites and the middle and lower classes. Wade maintains that the power of Costeñño music resides in its ambivalence and the multiple possibilities it presents for ideological rearticulation, in the tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity in national identity, and in the tension between the national and the transnational.

The golden era of Costeñño music was the 1950s and the 1960s. During that time, the term cumbia displaced porro. Although cumbia, with its transnational construct of appropriations, became the musical marker of Colombian nationality, it had to compete with salsa, rock, pachanga, merengue, and the bolero. With the consolidation of the national record industry, Costeñño records were released internationally under the designation cumbia in the mid-1960s in such countries as Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. Yet the question of why the music was labeled cumbia instead of porro requires more research.

This book is a fascinating account of how Wade managed to unravel the complex history of Costeñño music and its connotations of tropicality and blackness.

Managing Reproductive Life, an edited volume with 12 chapters by specialists in anthropology, gender, child development, and international health, explores women’s reproductive strategies in the context of global trends such as migration, war, and refugee displacement. The volume is organized on the premise that health policies may be of little value without attention to the cultural context of reproduction and to women’s agency.

Although the introduction overstates the widely accepted argument that scholars need to move beyond a narrow perspective that limits reproduction to the biological and that neglects the broader social, economic, and political contexts shaping reproductive behavior, the authors provide innovative ethnographic data and analysis organized around three principal themes: agency and identity, fertility and parenthood, and policy and vulnerable groups.

In her excellent chapter on Rajasthani women, Kumar argues convincingly that women’s reproductive decisions can best be understood by means of the motivations underlying women’s use of reproductive health services. She explores the emotional dimensions of women’s lives and details how spousal affection, notions of responsibility, and the developmental cycle of the family ultimately shape reproductive strategies.

Using ethnographic data from Bolivia, Hawkins and Price critique demographic and health policies that fail to account for how sexual and reproductive health are constituted within particular cultural and economic contexts. Attention to everyday practices of migrant women, including the role of emotion in shaping women’s decisions, leads the authors to conclude that a “neoliberal” and biomedical construction of the autonomous individual fails to explain women’s reproductive health strategies. Effective health policies will require broader approaches that address women’s overall lack of empowerment.

Both Montgomery and Day address aspects of reproductive health among sex workers and explore health risks, STDs, and the meaning of motherhood for their informants. Montgomery provides unusual ethnographic detail on child prostitutes in Thailand, pointing to the lack of local-level research on fertility and reproductive health, as well as on the fundamental causes of child prostitution. Day identifies the tension between the public and private lives of London sex workers, for whom the desire for motherhood is juxtaposed with frequent pregnancy terminations and associated risks of infertility.

Hampshire applies demographic and anthropological approaches to analyze fertility decisions and outcomes among Fulani in northern Burkina Faso. Her research cautions against making overly simplistic inferences from correlations between migration and fertility decline. She suggests that social changes anticipated with “modernization,” such as increased autonomy for women leading to reduced fertility, are less significant in the Fulani case than an unwanted increase in sterility, probably linked to STDs.

Belaunde similarly critiques demographic assumptions regarding natural and controlled fertility in her study of menstruation, birth, and couples’ relationships among the Airo-Pai of Amazonian Peru. She advocates a shift from a female to a couple-centered approach and links fertility with the culturally constructed expression of emotions between a couple and toward children. This case effectively illustrates that in contrast to demographic transition theory, integration into national society may imply abandonment of fertility regulation rather than increasing agency in women’s fertility decisions.

In her chapter on coping with infertility in Nigeria, Cornwall offers both a perspective on children’s “agency” in creating ties with foster mothers and poignant reflections on the meaning of infertility in a strongly pronatalist society. She suggests casting reproduction less as “a patterned set of choices than as a contingent process over time” (p. 155). Her case histories document how relations of mothering are produced and renegotiated, enabling some infertile women to assume the social role and identity of “mother.”

Similarly, Martin explores the meaning of children to parents in Hong Kong and contends that although children are valued for their potential economic and ritual contributions, the Chinese family is parent-centered. In spite of changes in family structure and a decline in fertility, filial piety remains idealized, and Western psychological traditions of intensive parenting appear to have had little impact.

As the opening chapter in the section devoted to policy issues, Boyden’s review of scientific conceptualizations of childhood and youth is less ethnographic than theoretical. She offers historical and cross-disciplinary perspectives on human development and critiques models of childhood that fail to account for individual agency, thus diverting attention from “the social and moral competencies” of children and adolescents (p. 179). Price and Hawkins’s subsequent chapter emphasizes the need for increased attention to sexual and reproductive health needs of youth. They review existing policies and programs in poor countries, recommend approaches to sex and reproductive health programs that are multidimensional and locally relevant, and document precisely which projects “work.”

Using case studies, Russell links macro- and microlevel perspectives on teen pregnancy in Teesside, U.K., and vividly details examples of personal decisions regarding sexuality that are often obscured in statistics. This chapter provides a particularly astute exploration of teenage sexual behavior and its public construction as a moral and social problem. Harris and Smyth conclude the policy discussion with a strong statement on refugee health issues that identifies structural constraints preventing the effective implementation of policies. They suggest that reproductive health cannot be separated from conditions of poverty, gender-based power relations, and “health” more broadly construed. They join numerous anthropologists in arguing that it is imperative to engage local populations in developing culturally relevant reproductive-health interventions.

This edited volume is notable for its coherence and the consistent attention to the themes of the three sections. One regrettable feature is the lack of reference to much of the anthropological literature on reproduction and child health published in the United States, which would have bolstered the volume editor’s introductory argument for the centrality of reproduction to anthropological theory. The book is most likely to interest scholars in medical anthropology, gender issues, and international health policy. It would be appropriate for advanced medical anthropology courses as well as specialized classes on international health, reproduction, or sexuality.

David Sutton’s subtly argued and highly original book is about memory, yes; but it takes its strength from the distinctive--and easily misunderstood--nature of food and drink as consumable goods. People can feel strongly about the things they eat, and food is essential to life; yet the things we eat often seem utterly prosaic. When food is consumed, unlike other material goods, its concrete substance is gone. But the consumption of food is linked socially to all else in life and the mind, including previous and future such acts of consumption. Although consuming it makes it disappear, food binds time.

Sutton was once stung by an Oxford don’s disdainful dismissal of his interest in the relationship between food and memory (“Food and memory? Why would anyone want to remember anything they had eaten?” [p. 1]). Though the author ought not to have been piqued--after all, he was in Great Britain, where much food is best quickly forgotten, and the don was actually providing evidence for Sutton’s major contention--that smidgen of Oxford snideness doubtless provided additional stimulus for the author’s thought. In five wide-ranging chapters, sustained both by ethnography and the literature, Sutton shows how the food of memory is also the memory of food. By deftly raising questions about links among food, consumption, and memory, and juggling them in illuminating ways for serious readers, he makes a good case for his central assertions: that the food-memory connection is different from other memory connections, and that the constructed relationship between food and memory is culturally specific and cross-culturally variable. One notable strength among others is the attention he pays to production, the description of which in much recent writing among anthropologists of food has fallen victim to exchange-induced amnesia.

A large portion of the book is ethnographic and concerns the Greek citizens of the island of Kalymnos, south of Samos in the Dodecanese, where Sutton appears to have lived for at least a couple of years off and on ever since high school. His relationship with Kalymnos and the Kalymnians is itself of considerable interest. He has many friends there, but in this book his interaction rests particularly with food in all its many aspects. In Kalymnos, his status as bec fin must be matched by his reputation as a genial freeloader. (And snoop? Do they have a nickname for him that captures his interest in their food? Does he know it?) But the people of Kalymnos clearly like him; he likes them, likes their food, and most of all likes the way they like their food--and they can tell.

Ritual, exchange, eating as embodied practice, the meal itself, and the nature of recipes are his five chapter subjects. In an epilogue Sutton reviews his argument and considers remembering and forgetting together. A short review of this sort leaves room to examine only a couple of issues.

In chapter 5, “Doing/Reading Cooking,” Sutton looks at how people learn to cook and whether (or how) different forms of that learning represent different stages in the history of society. Although Sutton thinks that the way people learn to cook may be different from the way that they learn to plow a field or repair a throw net, he recognizes that there are certain commonalities to such learning, having to do with the sort of society in which many things are learned approximately the same way: by watching, by “feel,” by doing, by doing often, and by caring. The world marches on, of course. Technical change does tend to turn kitchen actors into kitchen observers; and the worldwide decline in the importance of nonmachine psychomotor acts in fulfilling daily necessities is probably correlated with a similar decline in the respect shown such skills. This is not a good era for those destined to work all of their lives at the same job, whether they be janitors, fruitpickers, or hospital orderlies. Cooking is more of the same, but the negative consequences of a loss of respect for such work are not the same for a family cook as they are for apprenticing chefs. (That so many scions of privileged families should be sweating it out these days in this famous restaurant or that one is proof that it is not the same.) Sutton shows that the Kalymnian ladies work hard at pleasing their men. Though he found the basic ingredients they used surprisingly alike--I daresay ordinary--he was surprised at how importantly small variations (in spicing, say) could bulk in people’s thinking. Such highly individualized unevenness is surely another important index of the nonmachine, keenly conscious awareness of food that these people whom he admires share with each other. I was surprised that he was surprised.

Not until his conclusion does Sutton turn to hunger. It was certainly an important theme for those of his informants who remembered the Second World War; Greece suffered terribly under Fascist occupation. Hunger is a great memory stimulant, of course; when people get hungry they remember food. But it is not so simple, either. Sutton cites the memories of concentration camp prisoners, for many of whom the memory of food was a form of resistance. He refers to Cara De Silva’s book of the food memories of the prisoners in Terezin camp, where remembering was to stand against dehumanization. As I read, I remembered Jean-Paul Kauffmann.

The same day French correspondent Jean-Paul Kauffmann arrived at Beirut Airport (May 22, 1985), he was kidnapped by extremists. He wasn’t freed for three years. Every day of his confinement, Frank Prial of The New York Times tells us, Kauffmann recited by heart the 61 chateau names of the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines. He also wrote them down but lost his list each time his captors moved him--18 times. Then they took away his pen. By the end of 1986, he had begun to forget some of the fourth growths, and then some of the fifth growths. He was absolutely devastated by his forgetfulness. He felt he was drifting away from civilization, becoming a barbarian. Remembering was staying human, and staying a particular kind of human, too.

In the final two pages of Remembering Repasts, Sutton turns nicely to forgetting. After a long paragraph about what forgetting might have to do with food and memory, he makes a plea for ethnography: “In sum, ethnography, but ethnography that begins from the premise that food is not simply another topic that ‘symbolizes’ identity, but one that challenges us to rethink our methods, assumption and theories in new and productive ways” (p. 170).

This is an outstanding example of modern anthropology, one that reveals the unending potentialities of fieldwork for enriching our insights and improving our theories. A skillfully balanced mix of the author’s data and the data of others shows us how data--field data--fertilize the intellectual soil in which theory grows.

The cultural context for Smriti Srinivas’s book is Bangalore, the new “Silicon Valley” of India, which since the 1980s has attracted much attention from academics, developmentalists, and the popular media for its success as a high-tech center of research and software enterpreneurship. Srinivas concerns herself not so much with Bangalore’s high-tech boom as with its traditional religious performative complex. At the heart of the book is the Karaga jatre, a ritual dedicated to the goddess Draupadi, which is performed annually in the city by Vahnikula Kshatriyas, members of a caste group belonging to the region’s “backward classes” who identify themselves as descendants of Draupadi.

Srinivas demonstrates how Vahnikula Kshatriyas seek to promote their collective interests as a caste group and to optimize the opportunities available to them through the performance of the jatre. This ritual performance serves as a vital resource whereby they can reclaim their past and negotiate their present by creating a new “landscape of urban memory” through ritual, movement, and narrative. By their engagement with the jatre’s performative complex, they come to assert their group solidarity, forge new alliances with other caste groups and subgroups, mobilize politically, compete for the cultural and economic resources of the city, and assert their ritual importance at the very heart of Bangalore’s mythological history.

Srinivas brings together material from diverse sources to produce this extremely well-researched piece of work. She moves systematically from one theme to the next, carefully locating each within its particular historical and social context. In the first chapter she discusses the theoretical premise of her work. Performance and memory are the key analytical concepts she uses to explore the Karaga jatre ritual complex. She explains “performance” in both Western academic and indigenous Indian categories, demonstrating how performance comes to serve as a means for constructing collective memory. For the purposes of her book she defines “memory” as “an active mode whereby cultural material (events, persons, or places) are ‘re-collected’ or gathered up into a configuration” (p. 29).

In the second chapter Srinivas provides a detailed discussion of changes in Bangalore’s spatial configuration since its foundation in the middle of the 16th century. Much of the recent literature on Bangalore has focused on its development as a high-tech city, particularly on its sizeable software industry. Srinivas’s book provides a refreshing change from these works. By drawing attention to lesser-known aspects of Bangalore’s development, she explores how groups marginalized by mainstream developmental processes are affected by, and in turn negotiate, their collective experience of modernization and change.

In chapter 3 Srinivas discusses Bangalore’s urban performative complex. Her discussion here is not limited to the jatre but deals with shrines, cults, and festivals belonging to the diverse religious and ritual traditions that dot Bangalore’s sacred landscape. This discussion sets the context of the Karaga jatre and establishes linkages and connections between the jatre and elements of the larger ritual complex of which it is a part. The following chapter takes up the theme of the social identity and history of the Vahnikula Kshatriyas, who have experienced an erosion of their traditional occupational bases as a result of the changes in Bangalore’s economic, political, social, and physical environment. Srinivas deftly outlines the efforts of the Vahnikula Kshatriyas to mobilize as a caste over the years and their campaign to secure ever greater economic and political advantages in Bangalore.

After setting the context for her thesis in chapters 1 to 4, Srinivas goes on to describe the jatre in detail in chapters 5 and 6. She explains in sequence how, through ritual physical movement (across selected urban spaces of Bangalore) and oral narrative, the performance of the jatre facilitates the creation of urban landscapes of memory that accord with the Vahnikula Kshatriyas’ mythologized representations of themselves both in the past and in the shifting realities of the present.

Srinivas’s greatest strength lies in her systematic presentation of a vast amount of historical detail and factual information. What is perhaps lacking in the text, however, is a lively and engaging account of the experience of the jatre by participants and performers. We hear very little of the voices of the actors themselves; instead we encounter Srinivas’s painstaking description and analysis, made with systematic rigor and precision, but clinically detached from the humdrum and richness of real life experience. In several sections of the book--for example, those dealing with the mythology surrounding the Karaga jatre--Srinivas follows a mode of analysis that often appears arbitrary and lacks conviction. The problem is compounded by her excessive use of academic jargon, which adds to the sense of this work being strangely unconnected with the real world of the actors concerned.

Srinivas’ book straddles several academic disciplines. The themes she addresses pertain to research areas as wide-ranging as urban sociology, human geography, the ethnography of performance, religious studies, and South Asian history. This book would be highly useful for anyone interested in learning more about Bangalore’s ritual complex and about the cult of Draupadi, a subject underresearched in the academic literature. Srinivas also provides rich source material for scholars seeking information about Bangalore’s urban history and planning. Most importantly, the book is a valuable contribution to scholarship on processes of modernization and change in contemporary urban contexts, effectively demonstrating how ritual performance enables disadvantaged groups to reclaim their city for themselves by reconfiguring its spatial, temporal, and narrative history to their advantage.

The Appalachian Mountain People have in recent years been a rich source of stimulus for theoretical development in anthropology, political science, sociology, and linguistics. For more than a hundred years the Mountain People have been an internalized Other, unquestionably apart (“In, but not of America,” in William G. Frost’s phrasing [“Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly 83:311-319, 1899]), yet lacking most of the more familiar markers of Otherness, such as distinctive complexion, religion, or nationality. The Mountain People reveal their Otherness most noticeably in their speech. In Seldom Ask, Never Tell, Anita Puckett examines the linguistic constructions through which the Mountain People construct a local social and economic system that is set apart yet in ongoing relationships of labor and commodity exchange with the capitalistic system of the United States.

Puckett’s argument, in brief, is that language-in-use does not simply reflect but actually constitutes these social, political, and economic relationships. Economic relationships such as valuation, ownership, and exchange are created through complex patterns in which semantic categories (age, gender, kin), pragmatics, and metapragmatics are all intertwined to create a thick and stable discourse within the local community. When an agent of the larger capitalistic economy confronts this thick discourse, the typical result is any number of communicative failures. Puckett documents these failures and demonstrates why they occur.

Central to the local discourse is the idea of “belongin,’” which intertwines both persons and possessions in networks of possessive relationships. A “belongin’ network” for Puckett is only partly the network of kinship that many have noted in Appalachia. It can also include certain types of objects, homes, cars, gardens, and tools that, once incorporated into a belongin’ network, become decommoditized. Within a belongin’ network one is permitted to make certain semantically appropriate requests for objects and labor and to issue certain nonimperative directives. Such requests and directives are to be made only in certain specified formats and contexts. A cousin, for example, is permitted to request the loan of tools.

Although those outside the belongin’ network lack such rights and claims, they have a right to issue task directives, most typically around the nexus of wage labor. If they exceed these limits, communication fails (i.e., the employee quits), and the speaker who exceeded the boundary may be subjected to sanctions (e.g., his truck explodes).

Within the belongin’ network there are certain stylized forms for monetary exchange and compensated labor, such as “tradin’” and “helpin’ out.” The phrase “We’ll take care of you” implies not only that a service will be rendered but also that an obligation will be created. Through these linguistic mechanisms, the belongin’ network regulates flows of commodities, labor, and information in, from, and out to the capitalistic commodity system on its own terms.

Puckett concludes with a discussion of the linguistic ideology (using Silverstein’s term) of the Mountain People, showing how a number of linguistic forms--from highly contextual nonverbal socioeconomic interactions to highly textual religious stories and narratives--are arrayed on a continuum from context orientation to text orientation. According to Puckett, contextual communication includes both nonverbal exchanges and a number of metapragmatic designators that enfold the socioeconomic constitutive functions of language among the Mountain People.

By demonstrating how discourse constitutes economic relationships across class boundaries, Puckett makes a solid contribution to the evolving body of studies of language-in-use. Additionally, she sheds light on the speech of the Mountain People in ways that dialect collectors and accent measurers have not.

Every urban, middle-class practitioner--doctor, social worker, nurse, lawyer, business manager, educator, and even anthropologist--working among the Appalachian Mountain People should carry Seldom Ask, Never Tell under his or her arm. With every chapter I reflected on the malapropisms, miscues, rudenesses, and faux pas I might have avoided in my own fieldwork had I known then what I learned from this book.

One should not fault an already fine book for what it does not say. However, it appeared to me that, given the central place of land in the scheme of belongin,’ the lack of discourse or discussion of land transactions with outside agents was a notable omission. Perhaps it is something the Mountain People don’t talk about.

Seldom Ask, Never Tell is a fine example of how to examine the economic and politically constitutive acts of language-in-use in a manner that captures local nuances of communication and places them in a larger social context. One hopes that researchers in disciplines such as sociology and economics will find Puckett’s book as valuable as it is for those in linguistics and Appalachian studies.

At first glance Stress and Resilience by Leith Mullings and Alaka Wali could be understood as a contemporary reproductive health–related revision of Carol Stack’s work on networks and family among African American women. But the ethnographic and statistical data that Mullings and Wali present offer a much more complex and holistic view into the connections between health and social and reproductive life. Theirs is an attempt to seek further understanding of the strategies and structural components of health care in the United States and to examine the constructed concept of health itself in the context of Harlem. Far more than an investigation into how strategies operate and women negotiate their health and reproductive status, Mullings and Wali’s book provides an analysis of the various implications of those strategies and suggests a means of understanding the multiplicative aspects of race, gender, and health.

Research was supported by the Centers for Disease Control through an initiative focused on the prevention of chronic illness and reduction of high infant mortality among African Americans. Using ethnographic methods to complement the vast statistical data that they compile on African American women’s health, Mullings and Wali examine the social conditions that influence and are influenced by women’s health status. Most importantly, they attempt to address the question of why infant mortality statistics remain consistently higher in the African American community than in other ethnic and racial groups in the United States, even among college-educated women.

The authors gathered their ethnographic data through intensive participant-observation and longitudinal case studies, and they weave those data throughout the text in vignettes that complement the more quantitative elements. One remains acutely aware, however, that the book was prepared as part of a final report to the CDC funding agency. A key component to their research was an emphasis on the workplace and the attention given by employers to women’s health issues.

Reproductive health is a central concern not just for women who bear children. It is an issue that affects the children they bear and the communities in which reproductive health care is situated. In much the same manner that educational levels and access to education and resources affect community well being, access to reproductive health care also can be seen as tied to a wide range of social concerns. A higher level of educational attainment is often associated with higher use of contraception, and demographers and health care researchers in particular often use education as a proxy measure for “health.” What Mullings and Wali so aptly point out is that researchers should consider more fully the real structural elements that both facilitate and impede access to education and health care. By highlighting these mechanisms and recognizing that “health” itself is a social construction, researchers are better equipped to address a variety of social problems among African American communities.

Although seemingly intended primarily for research and public health communities, Stress and Resilience offers a unique example of in-depth ethnographic research and demonstrates how involved researchers can be in the daily lives of study participants. Mullings and Wali offer a direct challenge to quantitative models in health care, their narratives and descriptions of study participants pointing out that it is only through listening and observing at a local, everyday level that those interested in workplace policies will best understand the implications of health care plans and strategies. Reproductive health is not just about women; it is about networks, communities, and the structures (such as occupational settings) in which these are negotiated. Although Mullings and Wali’s attention to the topic of male health issues remains somewhat limited in this particular account, the stage is set for future research projects.

Mullings and Wali finish with a brief discussion of what they have termed the “Sojourner Syndrome.” They emphasize that African American women have long dealt with a triple burden of gender, race, and health problems and suggest that Sojourner Truth’s own, larger- than- life presence through the decades has fostered kinds of coping strategies--ones emphasizing agency--to ensure the successful, literal reproduction of the black community. The Sojourner Syndrome, then, is a means of describing the survival strategies that the authors have documented among black women in multiple contexts. Yet, ironically, what is clear from their research is that the syndrome and the survival strategies it generates are the source of continued health strains embodied by black women--women are literally laboring under the Sojourner Syndrome.

It is a bit frustrating, after having read such detailed ethnographic data and pouring over numerous statistical tables, to be left with a summary of less than one page. Readers are offered little, for example, in the way of explanation of how recognition of the Sojourner Syndrome might help further the future research that the authors call for throughout the text. Nor is there any discussion of how its use might help to disentangle various perceptions of race, health, and gender in the United States. The authors are forthcoming, however, in their admission that their own future work will emerge from their current research, and one can hope that more theoretically complex analysis ensues.

The monograph is a bridge between the public health reports documenting the ethnographers’ findings and future research into consistent disproportionately high rates of infant mortality in African American communities. It provides a carefully documented look at the interstitial spaces between women’s active negotiation of their own and their children’s health and welfare and the resultant consequences of those strategies.

Laura McClusky lived in a Mopan Maya village in Belize, where she studied “lashings,” or male-to-female partner violence. She introduces her beautifully storied ethnography as the first focused specifically on domestic violence among Maya; in fact, hers is among the first full-length monographs focused on domestic violence in any world region. Following faithfully from an introduction that pledges allegiance to narrative ethnography, McClusky organizes her chapters around person-centered, real-time narratives, followed by analytical sections that draw connections between violence and other themes as played out among the villagers: the importance of work and a gendered division of labor, how beatings can be construed as legitimate, daughters constrained by obligations to mothers and mothers-in-law, and the role of formal education in altering gender roles.

McClusky tells us that her narrative approach “is not unique, nor is it especially innovative” (p. 17), but I would argue that she takes it to a level that is indeed singular. She so eschews abstraction and decontextualized generalization (p. 164) that she hazards no analytical arguments unless she can organically tease them from her novelesque narrative. She consistently provides a wealth of detail, at times bordering on extraneous but always helping to paint vivid scenes--“I lean back in my chair, tipping it up on two legs. Uncomfortable in this new balance, I ease the front legs back down” (p. 192)--that demonstrate how McClusky exceeds the models she cites, practicing narrativity in a uniquely stringent sense.

One of the most difficult challenges authors of issue-specific ethnographies face is to provide adequate background, contextualization, and complexity; in this regard, McClusky’s approach contends admirably. Indeed, readers learn as much about Mayan Belizean ethnic identity and language use, child rearing, hand washing of clothes, and tortilla making--not to mention uncomfortable moments participant-observers face--as we do about violent encounters between men and women. Because of this richness, the monograph would be most valuable for introducing beginning anthropology students or lay readers to how intimate and vivid ethnography can be. The book’s final ethnographic chapter, “Traveling Spirits,” chronicles the author’s participation in a funeral for a woman who, we learn, had a contentious relationship with her daughter-in-law. For the first 24 pages of the chapter, critical readers might appreciate all we learn about Mopan funeral practices but wonder what, if anything, the events so carefully narrated have to do with the work’s focus on domestic violence. It comes as a pleasurable discovery, then, when in the analysis section we realize that the reason the dead woman’s son once struck his wife cannot be grasped without understanding child-fostering practices and related conflicts between the two women. When the dead woman’s grandchildren experience health threats after her death, we realize that she is “calling” the children to be with her in death, again for reasons tied to the unresolved issues between the deceased mother-in-law and living daughter-in-law and the son’s violent behavior in the face of these conflicts. This is a level of complexity and nuance that only ethnography can bring to an exploration of interpersonal violence.

One hesitates to criticize ethnography as well crafted and rich as this, and yet there are ways in which McClusky’s modest, stalwart particularism leads her to overlook the ethnological significance of her case. Just three examples may illustrate the point. First, anthropological literature on domestic violence cited in McClusky’s bibliography discusses a significant cross-cultural phenomenon some call the “token-torturer,” the mother-in-law who incites or is complicit in a son’s beating of his wife. The mother-in-law is a “token” because she represents and reproduces patriarchal oppression of women as she achieves greater status and power through age. McClusky’s treatment eloquently grounds patterns of violence linked to mothers-in-law in Mopan Mayan concepts of tsik (respect) and naab’l (the soul), but she never acknowledges how the Mopan case might fit into broader, cross-cultural patterns. Second, McClusky underlines how violent behavior might be exacerbated by young women’s “rebellion” around issues such as arranged patrilocal marriage, double standards for marital fidelity, expectations around work, and freedom to travel. Although she again draws from broader Mayan literature in analyzing such rebellions, at no time does she seek to relate them to rapid shifts in gender roles sweeping nearly all of the world’s societies and the increasing tensions, insecurities, and violence that some authors are beginning to associate with diverse women’s movements and concomitant gender transformations. Finally, and perhaps most significant, McClusky finds that as women age and gain status, “abusive husbands in the village apparently ‘stop feeling jealous’ as they get older and subsequently stop hitting their wives” (p. 169). Such a finding flies directly in the face of the received wisdom in most Western industrial societies that domestic violence inherently worsens with time and that violent men’s recidivism is inevitable. Because developing countries tend all too easily to incorporate such “facts” from more developed nations into their own institutional response strategies, the significance of McClusky’s counterexample, along with others from the cross-cultural record, deserves to be underlined more forcefully.

In her introduction, McClusky recounts being told that she would never get funding to study domestic violence, because it is a “closed topic” (p. 7). She objects, systematically dismissing reasons she believes such violence might be so viewed: It is not exotic enough, it is “too ugly” (p. 8), it is too close to home. I am struck, however, that in a work otherwise so epistemologically honest the author overlooks a central reason partner violence might be viewed as a closed topic: Acts that occur behind closed doors, that are linked to anger, pain, and shame, are often simply not accessible to participant-observers for firsthand study. In fact, as the book’s subtitle suggests, this work analyzes stories about domestic violence--and only women’s stories--for McClusky never witnessed the behavior that forms her topic. Critical exploration of the elusiveness of interpersonal violence as a subject of study would have enhanced this already worthy contribution.

Few scholars have conducted sustained ethnographic fieldwork in the same region for more than 30 years; even fewer have command of 500 years of history. Enrique Mayer is the rare anthropologist whose life-long commitment to a region has resulted in a remarkable body of work. The Articulated Peasant brings together that work, resulting in a masterful study of Andean peasant economies from the Inca period to the present day.

Mayer’s book is both history and historiography. His impressive analysis of the household and its relationship to other households, the community, and commodity markets is based on his own research and an exceptionally even-handed treatment of 50 years of scholarship. Mayer begins by introducing the reader to the household as an economic unit, relating “home, family, gender, and age with the circulation of goods and services in order to clarify the inner workings of the home and the ways in which it links up with wider spheres” (p. 1). His discussion includes a detailed review of the broader literature on households and introduces the reader to his path-breaking study of Tangor, a small village in central Peru where Mayer first conducted fieldwork in the late 1960s.

Chapters 2 through 9 are based on revised material that has been published over the past 30 years. The chapters hold together well and present a compelling and rich portrait of highland Peru. Mayer starts with the Incas, focusing on trade and commerce. Engaging the work of his advisor, John V. Murra, one of the pioneers of Andean studies, Mayer takes on the well-traveled debate regarding the existence of trade and markets prior to the Spanish conquest. Insisting, as he does throughout the book, that no economic system is as pure as the models that scholars construct for it, Mayer underscores the fact that circuits of trade were firmly established prior to the European invasion.

In chapter 3, Mayer reconstructs a group of households in rural 16th-century Peru. This chapter takes the reader into the household--not the abstract household of scholarly models, but the lived household of a common peasant, Don Agostín Luna Capcha. Readers see firsthand how Don Agostín organizes his time, efforts, and resources; how he is forced to give up much of what he produces in tribute (and what he thinks about it!); and how he thinks about work, domestic affairs, family, and kinship. The testimony’s richness is enhanced by its timing: 1562, just 30 years after the Spanish invasion.

Mayer then takes us into the 20th century and his fieldwork in Tangor. He focuses on reciprocity, explaining in a very readable way how labor services, goods, gifts, and ceremonial exchanges are the expression of a complex network of kinship, social, and political obligations that link households to the wider social world. In chapter 5, Mayer looks at another key feature of Andean life: barter. Once again, he does an exceptional job of demonstrating how abstract models are complicated by the reality of daily life. Here, the reader follows Don Eulogio, a Tangor farmer, on his journey to secure potatoes through bartering. His fascinating voyage not only involves the exchange of goods and labor but also cements (future) ties between friends, families, and communities.

In chapter 6, Mayer takes on the region’s most controversial commodity, arguing that coca is absolutely central to the peasant economy. It lubricates reciprocal exchanges, creating relationships between diverse regions, which in turn serve to sustain even wider networks of exchange. Coca, for Mayer, is both integrated into Andean communal life and actively generates this integration.

Mayer consistently highlights the importance of culture for understanding economic relationships, but nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of profit (ch. 7) and the organization of production at the community level (ch. 8). Chapter 9 is the one that anthropologists will perhaps enjoy the most. In it, Mayer brings together the insights of the previous eight chapters through an exceptionally rich case study of communal control and land tenure in the community of Laraos. How is land used? Who decides? And how does land use change over time? As Mayer’s analysis shows, these rather straightforward questions have complicated answers that take us into the complex world of production practices, legal reforms, and local-national politics and history.

A book on the Andes would not be complete without a discussion of neoliberalism, the subject of Mayer’s final chapter. As always, Mayer’s focus is pragmatic, centering on the needs and demands of both peasants and their environment during the contemporary period.

The Articulated Peasant is a must read for Andeanists of any political persuasion or academic discipline; no one interested in Andean peasant economies can afford to ignore this remarkable work. Mayer’s scholarship is impressive both for its ethnographic specificity and its historical breadth. This book will also interest anyone concerned with questions of economic and environmental sustainability, indigenous knowledge, development, and the relationships between culture, economy, and history.

Le Sueur’s book focuses on the demise of support among intellectuals for Franco-Algerian reconciliation during the Algerian War. He identifies 1957 as a turning point, when evidence of French torture led even moderates to support Algerian independence. That same year, we also learn, French public opinion turned against the rebel National Liberation Front (FLN), which had mounted a terrorism campaign against rival nationalists and innocent French citizens. By the end of the war, Le Sueur argues, ideas of reconciliation had been replaced by a rigid identity politics that posited East and West as irreconcilable; the FLN also celebrated cathartic revolutionary violence as necessary for authentic national selfhood. Ultimately, intellectuals from all camps produced crude ideological representations of the struggle: brutal Islamic fanatics committed to a dangerous pan-Arabism (the right), an instance of the international socialist revolution (the left), or a rejection of European history and culture (Third Worldists). Le Sueur suggests that most French intellectuals, whatever their politics, were unable to appreciate the specificity of the Algerian nationalist movement.

This study is the product of an impressive amount of research based on official archives, private papers, personal interviews, and published sources (from the canonical to the obscure). It is organized around close readings of primary texts that demonstrate the author’s familiarity with the broader discussions of which they were a part. The reader is presented with a rich panorama of the intellectual debates occurring at this decisive historical moment. By outlining the nuances that distinguished intellectual positions, Le Sueur challenges the Manichean distinctions that became features of decolonization rhetoric on both sides of the conflict (e.g., French vs. Algerians, pro-war vs. antiwar). But the many virtues of this kind of intellectual history are partially offset by its limitations. Le Sueur is more interested in identifying “propaganda” within discrete texts than in treating them as components of broader discourses that shaped colonial politics. Given the importance he accords to Bourdieu’s writing, this emphasis on individuals and utterances rather than the doxa that they (re)produced is surprising. The narrative risks becoming an extended literature review; this textual inventory needs to be integrated more fully into the book’s broader arguments.

Le Sueur promises to explore intellectual communities, intellectual legitimacy, and identity politics. But his account is concerned with individuals rather than communities, refers sporadically to intellectual legitimacy, and does not confront identity politics directly until the final chapter. Our attention is thereby diverted from its many important insights, including the way intellectuals became combatants in a mediatized struggle over international public opinion; intellectuals’ fear that national legal and political institutions were threatened by the French military’s resort to what were seen as fascistic tactics; the tendency among French and Algerians to distinguish “true” republican France from its corrupt colonial representatives; and the implications of public debates over collective responsibility, the ethics and efficacy of revolutionary terrorism, and the contradictions implicit in French left-wing anticolonialism.

Unfortunately, Le Sueur slips into the very Manichean thinking that he derides by opposing believers in reconciliation (whom he valorizes) to extremist prophets of alterity (whom he denounces). On one side, he identifies insiders (exemplified by Camus, Feraoun, Berque, and Bourdieu) who understood local Algerian realities. These political moderates protested the war’s violence, recognized colonial identities as hybrid, and believed that some kind of future relationship between France and Algeria was viable. On the other side, he places outsiders (exemplified by Sartre and Fanon), who appropriated the Algerian struggle for dogmatic ideologies, glorified revolutionary violence, and insisted that differences between Europeans and Algerians were irreconcilable. The book even concludes with a strong, but unsupported, claim that Sartre’s and Fanon’s ideas were responsible for Algeria’s postcolonial failures and its current war. Le Sueur identifies dreams of Franco-Algerian federation during the war as paternalistic, self-serving, and unrealistic. But his study is also infused with a longing for the idea of reconciliation, whose passing he mourns.

It is certainly legitimate to criticize Sartre and Fanon for having used Algeria to promote their own agendas or to question their canonization in academic discussions of decolonization. Clearing space for the voices of others who promoted different political visions is salutary. But Le Sueur’s critique raises more questions than it resolves. What epistemological location allows him to judge Fanon an unacceptable spokesperson for the FLN, which had charged him with this mission? What, other than an essentialist conception of identity, allows Le Sueur to discount Fanon as an outsider? What version of reconciliation does the author feel merits recuperation? How would it have been historically viable? Didn’t Fanon warn us about the neocolonial alliance between bourgeois nationalists, international capitalism, and former colonial powers? How could reconciliation not have devolved into economic or political dependence during the Cold War? Didn’t the supposedly redemptive ethnographic knowledge possessed and produced by the insiders risk devolving into Orientalism?

Nevertheless, Uncivil War is a welcome installment to the new historiography of French imperialism. It will serve as a valuable resource for scholars interested in the ideological dimensions of the Algerian War as well as for readers interested in the political context that shaped postwar French intellectual currents. Le Sueur demonstrates that it is possible to write a well-documented, wide-ranging, and provocative work of 20th-century history, despite the formidable restrictions on access to official archives. In his favorable preface, Bourdieu aptly describes the book as devoted to “defenders of lost causes,” which is certainly a worthy scholarly and political enterprise.

Le Sueur’s book focuses on the demise of support among intellectuals for Franco-Algerian reconciliation during the Algerian War. He identifies 1957 as a turning point, when evidence of French torture led even moderates to support Algerian independence. That same year, we also learn, French public opinion turned against the rebel National Liberation Front (FLN), which had mounted a terrorism campaign against rival nationalists and innocent French citizens. By the end of the war, Le Sueur argues, ideas of reconciliation had been replaced by a rigid identity politics that posited East and West as irreconcilable; the FLN also celebrated cathartic revolutionary violence as necessary for authentic national selfhood. Ultimately, intellectuals from all camps produced crude ideological representations of the struggle: brutal Islamic fanatics committed to a dangerous pan-Arabism (the right), an instance of the international socialist revolution (the left), or a rejection of European history and culture (Third Worldists). Le Sueur suggests that most French intellectuals, whatever their politics, were unable to appreciate the specificity of the Algerian nationalist movement.

This study is the product of an impressive amount of research based on official archives, private papers, personal interviews, and published sources (from the canonical to the obscure). It is organized around close readings of primary texts that demonstrate the author’s familiarity with the broader discussions of which they were a part. The reader is presented with a rich panorama of the intellectual debates occurring at this decisive historical moment. By outlining the nuances that distinguished intellectual positions, Le Sueur challenges the Manichean distinctions that became features of decolonization rhetoric on both sides of the conflict (e.g., French vs. Algerians, pro-war vs. antiwar). But the many virtues of this kind of intellectual history are partially offset by its limitations. Le Sueur is more interested in identifying “propaganda” within discrete texts than in treating them as components of broader discourses that shaped colonial politics. Given the importance he accords to Bourdieu’s writing, this emphasis on individuals and utterances rather than the doxa that they (re)produced is surprising. The narrative risks becoming an extended literature review; this textual inventory needs to be integrated more fully into the book’s broader arguments.

Le Sueur promises to explore intellectual communities, intellectual legitimacy, and identity politics. But his account is concerned with individuals rather than communities, refers sporadically to intellectual legitimacy, and does not confront identity politics directly until the final chapter. Our attention is thereby diverted from its many important insights, including the way intellectuals became combatants in a mediatized struggle over international public opinion; intellectuals’ fear that national legal and political institutions were threatened by the French military’s resort to what were seen as fascistic tactics; the tendency among French and Algerians to distinguish “true” republican France from its corrupt colonial representatives; and the implications of public debates over collective responsibility, the ethics and efficacy of revolutionary terrorism, and the contradictions implicit in French left-wing anticolonialism.

Unfortunately, Le Sueur slips into the very Manichean thinking that he derides by opposing believers in reconciliation (whom he valorizes) to extremist prophets of alterity (whom he denounces). On one side, he identifies insiders (exemplified by Camus, Feraoun, Berque, and Bourdieu) who understood local Algerian realities. These political moderates protested the war’s violence, recognized colonial identities as hybrid, and believed that some kind of future relationship between France and Algeria was viable. On the other side, he places outsiders (exemplified by Sartre and Fanon), who appropriated the Algerian struggle for dogmatic ideologies, glorified revolutionary violence, and insisted that differences between Europeans and Algerians were irreconcilable. The book even concludes with a strong, but unsupported, claim that Sartre’s and Fanon’s ideas were responsible for Algeria’s postcolonial failures and its current war. Le Sueur identifies dreams of Franco-Algerian federation during the war as paternalistic, self-serving, and unrealistic. But his study is also infused with a longing for the idea of reconciliation, whose passing he mourns.

It is certainly legitimate to criticize Sartre and Fanon for having used Algeria to promote their own agendas or to question their canonization in academic discussions of decolonization. Clearing space for the voices of others who promoted different political visions is salutary. But Le Sueur’s critique raises more questions than it resolves. What epistemological location allows him to judge Fanon an unacceptable spokesperson for the FLN, which had charged him with this mission? What, other than an essentialist conception of identity, allows Le Sueur to discount Fanon as an outsider? What version of reconciliation does the author feel merits recuperation? How would it have been historically viable? Didn’t Fanon warn us about the neocolonial alliance between bourgeois nationalists, international capitalism, and former colonial powers? How could reconciliation not have devolved into economic or political dependence during the Cold War? Didn’t the supposedly redemptive ethnographic knowledge possessed and produced by the insiders risk devolving into Orientalism?

Nevertheless, Uncivil War is a welcome installment to the new historiography of French imperialism. It will serve as a valuable resource for scholars interested in the ideological dimensions of the Algerian War as well as for readers interested in the political context that shaped postwar French intellectual currents. Le Sueur demonstrates that it is possible to write a well-documented, wide-ranging, and provocative work of 20th-century history, despite the formidable restrictions on access to official archives. In his favorable preface, Bourdieu aptly describes the book as devoted to “defenders of lost causes,” which is certainly a worthy scholarly and political enterprise.

Le Sueur’s book focuses on the demise of support among intellectuals for Franco-Algerian reconciliation during the Algerian War. He identifies 1957 as a turning point, when evidence of French torture led even moderates to support Algerian independence. That same year, we also learn, French public opinion turned against the rebel National Liberation Front (FLN), which had mounted a terrorism campaign against rival nationalists and innocent French citizens. By the end of the war, Le Sueur argues, ideas of reconciliation had been replaced by a rigid identity politics that posited East and West as irreconcilable; the FLN also celebrated cathartic revolutionary violence as necessary for authentic national selfhood. Ultimately, intellectuals from all camps produced crude ideological representations of the struggle: brutal Islamic fanatics committed to a dangerous pan-Arabism (the right), an instance of the international socialist revolution (the left), or a rejection of European history and culture (Third Worldists). Le Sueur suggests that most French intellectuals, whatever their politics, were unable to appreciate the specificity of the Algerian nationalist movement.

This study is the product of an impressive amount of research based on official archives, private papers, personal interviews, and published sources (from the canonical to the obscure). It is organized around close readings of primary texts that demonstrate the author’s familiarity with the broader discussions of which they were a part. The reader is presented with a rich panorama of the intellectual debates occurring at this decisive historical moment. By outlining the nuances that distinguished intellectual positions, Le Sueur challenges the Manichean distinctions that became features of decolonization rhetoric on both sides of the conflict (e.g., French vs. Algerians, pro-war vs. antiwar). But the many virtues of this kind of intellectual history are partially offset by its limitations. Le Sueur is more interested in identifying “propaganda” within discrete texts than in treating them as components of broader discourses that shaped colonial politics. Given the importance he accords to Bourdieu’s writing, this emphasis on individuals and utterances rather than the doxa that they (re)produced is surprising. The narrative risks becoming an extended literature review; this textual inventory needs to be integrated more fully into the book’s broader arguments.

Le Sueur promises to explore intellectual communities, intellectual legitimacy, and identity politics. But his account is concerned with individuals rather than communities, refers sporadically to intellectual legitimacy, and does not confront identity politics directly until the final chapter. Our attention is thereby diverted from its many important insights, including the way intellectuals became combatants in a mediatized struggle over international public opinion; intellectuals’ fear that national legal and political institutions were threatened by the French military’s resort to what were seen as fascistic tactics; the tendency among French and Algerians to distinguish “true” republican France from its corrupt colonial representatives; and the implications of public debates over collective responsibility, the ethics and efficacy of revolutionary terrorism, and the contradictions implicit in French left-wing anticolonialism.

Unfortunately, Le Sueur slips into the very Manichean thinking that he derides by opposing believers in reconciliation (whom he valorizes) to extremist prophets of alterity (whom he denounces). On one side, he identifies insiders (exemplified by Camus, Feraoun, Berque, and Bourdieu) who understood local Algerian realities. These political moderates protested the war’s violence, recognized colonial identities as hybrid, and believed that some kind of future relationship between France and Algeria was viable. On the other side, he places outsiders (exemplified by Sartre and Fanon), who appropriated the Algerian struggle for dogmatic ideologies, glorified revolutionary violence, and insisted that differences between Europeans and Algerians were irreconcilable. The book even concludes with a strong, but unsupported, claim that Sartre’s and Fanon’s ideas were responsible for Algeria’s postcolonial failures and its current war. Le Sueur identifies dreams of Franco-Algerian federation during the war as paternalistic, self-serving, and unrealistic. But his study is also infused with a longing for the idea of reconciliation, whose passing he mourns.

It is certainly legitimate to criticize Sartre and Fanon for having used Algeria to promote their own agendas or to question their canonization in academic discussions of decolonization. Clearing space for the voices of others who promoted different political visions is salutary. But Le Sueur’s critique raises more questions than it resolves. What epistemological location allows him to judge Fanon an unacceptable spokesperson for the FLN, which had charged him with this mission? What, other than an essentialist conception of identity, allows Le Sueur to discount Fanon as an outsider? What version of reconciliation does the author feel merits recuperation? How would it have been historically viable? Didn’t Fanon warn us about the neocolonial alliance between bourgeois nationalists, international capitalism, and former colonial powers? How could reconciliation not have devolved into economic or political dependence during the Cold War? Didn’t the supposedly redemptive ethnographic knowledge possessed and produced by the insiders risk devolving into Orientalism?

Nevertheless, Uncivil War is a welcome installment to the new historiography of French imperialism. It will serve as a valuable resource for scholars interested in the ideological dimensions of the Algerian War as well as for readers interested in the political context that shaped postwar French intellectual currents. Le Sueur demonstrates that it is possible to write a well-documented, wide-ranging, and provocative work of 20th-century history, despite the formidable restrictions on access to official archives. In his favorable preface, Bourdieu aptly describes the book as devoted to “defenders of lost causes,” which is certainly a worthy scholarly and political enterprise.

Leonard and Kaneff have made a valuable contribution to the anthropology of postsocialist countries by assembling a wide range of studies dealing with rural social identities in the context of changing state-rural and urban-rural relationships--relationships that are often coterminous, since agricultural policies are frequently dictated by urban-based politicians and reformers with predominantly urban constituents.

Leonard and Kaneff’s analytical point of departure is the concept of peasantry, a concept that has been rediscovered by intellectuals in postsocialist states “just as western anthropologists seem to be questioning [its] enduring relevance” (p. 11). Government authorities viewed the privatization of agricultural land and the re-creation of a peasantry as a solution to inefficiencies in collectives. Whereas Leonard and Kaneff appear to take a critical stance toward the concept of peasantry, pointing out its use by urban elites as a tool of subjugation and decrying the essentialist arguments made by many Western anthropologists, they somewhat uncritically accept the validity of the categories rural and urban. Although that dichotomy may be useful in some instances, the editors largely ignore various anthropological critiques of the dichotomy, beginning with the “peasants in cities” concept and the ideas of Anthony Leeds as early as the 1960s. Even Redfield spoke of a rural–urban “continuum” rather than a dichotomy and noted the two-way influence of urban and rural communities.

The term peasant--or its local equivalent (the authors generally do not address the issue of whether the term can be translated directly)--is rarely used as a self-descriptive term. Only in the Vietnamese case do the informants describe themselves as peasants, and, interestingly, they are petty traders in cities, who use this identification to downplay their role as entrepreneurs, a role traditionally frowned on in a communist society. They emphasize their rural roots, even though they rarely return to their home communities, even at harvest time. In all of the other cases, the label is either imposed by outsiders or accepted by those engaging in agriculture as a positive designation but one that does not apply to them.

Although one may question the editors’ choice of the concept of “peasant” as an analytical tool, the book achieves the editors’ goal of highlighting the broad range of adaptations undertaken by individuals engaging in agriculture, as well as the disregard government authorities have had for their needs. Flower provides examples of the disdain urbanites have for peasants in China, in spite of Maoism’s professed high regard for the peasantry. Conversely, Leonard shows why Chinese peasants were reluctant to plant more than a limited portion of their fields in new high-yielding varieties of corn. The cadres, intent on furthering their own promotion by implementing change, failed to anticipate that the higher production cost and inferior taste of the new corn would decrease its appeal.

Similarly, Perrotta and Humphrey each show how economic changes instituted by the government are only partly carried out in practice in post-Soviet Russia and resulted in complex and contradictory shifts in rural identities. As in the case of the Chinese peasants, the cost of the transition to a more market-oriented economy is largely borne by agricultural producers, who, increasingly excluded from the state system of distribution, are at the mercy of powerful networks of former governmental officials turned entrepreneurs who control access to inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery as well as the price of agricultural products. As a result, and because the government has not conceded the right to buy and sell land, few such “private peasant farms” have been created in spite of the government promotion of such farms through land reform and the institution of private property. Rather than take their land out of the collective, agricultural workers merely continue the Soviet-era practice of intensively cultivating small areas to offset irregular wage payments, often with the aid of inputs from the collectives where they continue to be employed. Humphrey shows, in addition, how the cultivation of private plots has accelerated among inhabitants of provincial towns and cities, a trend she considers “an expedient, not a way of life” (p. 153) and one that does not constitute a movement toward peasantization. This is in marked contrast, as Czegledy describes, to the continued popularity of small-scale farming by urban-dwelling Hungarians, who, for cultural and social reasons, continue to cultivate small plots even if there is no strong economic necessity.

Of particular interest are Perrotta’s observations regarding the changing structure of Russian collectives. Whereas many collectives continue the Soviet tradition of autocratic management, decision making in others has become more democratic. A major factor determining the nature of member involvement in the collective “seems to be whether actual, official share certificates have been issued or not” (p. 125). The democratization of decision-making has occurred in spite of the fact that there are rarely any profits to be distributed. This process would constitute a marked departure from what Humphrey describes as the idea of the “Soviet peasant,” a contradictory concept in which the “the core of what was peasant-like in the peasantry: autonomous, property-conscious economizing” was suppressed and the “qualities of egalitarianism...and corporatism were excessively promoted” (p. 140). Antagonism against state-mandated dissolution of collectives is also the subject of Kaneff’s analysis of Bulgarian privatization. Such antagonism constitutes a marked change from the more harmonious relationship between the state and the rural population and by extension between rural and urban sectors that existed in the Soviet era.

Finally, Pine shows that the differing manner in which elderly informants viewed their experience of World War II in two rural Polish communities can be explained by differences in the manner in which they were integrated into the wider society.

Broad in range and yet complementary, clearly written and with a clear and important message, the essays in Leonard and Kaneff’s book are suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses on postsocialist societies, identity, and rural change, as well as for development practitioners.

In the early 1990s, conventional wisdom in Kalahari hunter-gatherer studies was challenged by a revisionist movement that precipitated “the Great Kalahari Debate.” Ethnicity, Hunter-Gatherers, and the “Other” provides a collection of “traditionalist” answers to this revisionist challenge. The contributors draw from archaeology, ethnohistory, genetics, linguistics, and contemporary ethnography to argue that precolonial hunter-gatherers in central and southern Africa were autonomous cultural groups, contra the revisionists who claim that they were an underclass created by the regional political economy. All of the contributors demonstrate how hunter-gatherer interactions and associations with agriculturalists and agropastoralists were marked by varying degrees of autonomy, dependency, and assimilation. The reader should already be familiar with revisionist arguments to profit from the rebuttals supplied in this volume.

In the introductory chapter, Susan Kent provides a cursory overview of the issues at stake. She argues that African foragers are a “distinct culture” through a perplexing elaboration of the term ethnicity, leaving readers with a highly idiosyncratic and contradictory distinction between “ethnic groups” and “cultures.” For example, she claims that four distinct “cultures” exist in the Kalahari: the “Basarwa,” the Khoi, Bantu-speakers, and Europeans. Referring to groups as disparate as Afrikaners, Germans, and British as belonging to a homogeneous “culture” is more controversial than Kent appreciates. Her claim that British and Afrikaners are separate ethnic groups within the larger European culture is contradicted by her use of the term ethnicity “to refer to different homogeneous cultures, rather than subcultures within a larger pluralistic [culture]” (p. 2). If one accepts this distinction, one should also claim that the San and Khoi are different ethnic groups within the larger “Khoisan culture.” Yet Kent counts the San as “a distinct culture” that has outlasted the culture of the Khoi. The introduction is weakened by straw-man arguments, spurious explanations of anomalous data, non sequiturs, and an attempt to build a priori proofs of San cultural identity that provide little insight into how forager ethnicity is formed.

In separate contributions, Karima Sadr and Susan Kent address the question of how autonomy and domination would appear in the archaeological record. Kent’s chapter compares findings from North American sites where African slaves were used with those from central and southern Africa. Her data yielded expected findings: Slavery resulted in a decline in the material culture of the subordinated groups. Unfortunately, Kent pays little attention to important differences between African and North American forms of slavery. Alison Brooks provides a comprehensive overview of the genetic, linguistic, and archaeological data from central and southern Africa and asks why some groups of foragers were assimilated into other ethnic groups whereas others remained autonomous. She concludes that the ability to retain territory, linguistic boundary-maintenance practices, and lineage systems all contributed to the continued viability of foraging societies.

Three chapters examine the consequences of contact and association from an ethnohistorical perspective. Richard Lee draws from archaeology, ethnohistory, and contemporary interviews to compile a convincing argument that contact between the Dobe-Nyae Nyae Ju/’hoansi and Bantu-speakers did not translate into relationships of inequality or the assimilation of Ju/’hoansi. Alan Barnard and Michael Taylor outline the history and contemporary situation of ten San groups in southern Africa and conclude, like Lee, that culture contact is not sufficient to demonstrate assimilation. In an elegantly argued chapter, Mathias Guenther illustrates how contact actually encouraged the formation of egalitarian foraging bands. He departs from the cultural ecology approach by claiming that prior to Bantu and European encroachments into Ghanzi, the Nharo and ¹Au//eisi were politically complex and hierarchical large-game hunters. After Bantu and Europeans depleted the game, the Nharo and ¹Au//eisi shifted to a gathering-based foraging mode of production and familiar egalitarian social systems.

Frank Marlowe, and Axel Kööhler and Jerome Lewis examine the Great Kalahari Debate in light of data from studies on central African foragers. Marlowe argues that interaction between the Hadza and nonforagers did not undermine the foraging lifestyle and culture of the Hadza. Kööhler and Lewis examine relations between Twa Pygmies and outsiders and suggest that scholars should pay more attention to the different ways that foragers and nonforagers interpret their relationships with each other.

All of the contributors rightly insist that trade and association do not automatically translate into assimilation, and they highlight the adaptability of foraging societies. Although there are some disappointing pieces in the volume, the strongest essays well reward the attention of specialists.

A series of communal riots between Hindus and Muslims that rocked Bombay after the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992 shattered the long cherished cosmopolitanism of the city. Why did India’s commercial capital and premier modern metropolis go up in flames? What fueled the communal divide? In Wages of Violence, Thomas Blom Hansen seeks to locate the communal fault lines in the city and how they have been produced and in the process illuminate the transformation of political culture in India.

Focusing on the rise and entrenchment of the Shiv Sena (a Hindu nativist political organization named after the 17th-century Maratha warrior-king, Shivaji) in Bombay, Hansen analyzes “the historical formation of the political discourses, the identities, and the conflicts that changed Bombay from being the preeminent symbol of India’s secular, industrial modernity to become a powerful symbol of the very crisis of this vision” (p. 8). Hansen’s attention to historically constituted discourses of vernacular identity, grassroots-level organization of the Sena in the city, and the Shiv Sena’s desire to refashion the modern in their nativist image locates the upsurge of communal violence not in an aberrant or pathological discourse but in an idiom of plebeian politics.

The reversal in Bombay’s identity, Hansen suggests, was manifest in the city’s renaming as Mumbai in November 1995 by a Shiv Sena–led government that had come to power in Maharashtra earlier in the year. The naming was symptomatic of an assertion of vernacular identity that had taken root during the course of the movement for a united Maharashtra based on the Marathi language. As Hansen puts it, “the change of the name was a rather straightforward assertion of the nativist agenda of claiming Bombay and all its symbols of modernity and power to be the natural property of local Marathi speakers, which Shiv Sena had been pursuing since its inception in 1966” (p. 3). What this claim glossed was that “most Marathi speakers were as alien in the city as everybody else” (p. 3). The vernacular appropriation of the modern was an effort to domesticate the alien urban space of Bombay, which was dominated by a cosmopolitan, non-Marathi commercial elite. In this urban landscape Maharashtrians remained the distinct underdogs.

Hansen explains how the categories invoked by the Sena to assert their identity were flexible and fluid in their historical context. The identification of the caste category “Maratha” with Maharashtra derived from the valorization of a non-Brahmin past that construed the Kunbi-Maratha peasant caste constellation as bahujan (the majority) in contrast to the elite shetji-bhatji (merchant moneylender–Brahmin) combine. The porousness of the category “Maratha” enabled the Sena to claim representation of the majority in the state and to speak on behalf of the Marathi manus (ordinary Marathi speakers) .

In the Muslim mohalla (neighborhood), as the textile mills closed during the 1970s, skilled Muslim weavers from north India lost their jobs. As a result, they became self-employed or migrated to the Gulf countries for work. Among the former were some who inhabited the twilight zone between legality and illegality, provoking the image of the Muslim badmashes (rogue-criminals). After the bomb blasts in Bombay in March 1993, the figure of the Muslim mafia don, promoting terrorism in league with the enemy across the border, acquired mythical proportions. It is this refashioning and reformulation of identities that Hansen underscores.

The growth of the Shiv Sena announced the “decline of an older political culture that espoused paternalist social and cultural incorporation of the large majority of the population into a highly unequal system of political clientelism” (p. 9). In its place emerged a plebeian political culture manifested in the local dadas (strongmen), who were also the local chiefs of the Sena shakhas (branches). It was through these local branches that the Sena maintained its ties with the people even during its lean years (ch. 4).

Initially the Sena’s battles were with the non-Maharashtrians who controlled not only Bombay’s economic resources but also the white-collar jobs. It was to displace the south Indian white-collar workers and the bhaiyyas (migrant blue-collar workers from north India) that the Shiv Sena launched its violent crusade in the late 1960s. For about a decade beginning in 1975 the organization was relegated to the background of Maharashtra politics as a result of its leader Bal Thackeray’s political misjudgement. However, during this interregnum the Sena consolidated its local branch organizations. A spate of communal riots in the early 1980s in towns like Pune, Sholapur, Malegaon, and Bhiwandi enabled the Sena activists to appear as the saviors of the Hindus and revived their flagging political fortunes. At the same time, Sena volunteers were enthusiastic participants in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)–led Ramjanambhumi movement in Ayodhya that led to the wrecking of the Babri mosque. This Sena turn against the Muslims bore political results when the organization won the elections to the Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1985.

Although Hansen proposes a seamless continuity in the Shiv Sena’s social imaginary of xenophobia and nativism, its hostility toward Muslims can hardly be understood without taking into account the neoliberal restructuring of industries in Bombay, as well as the fight against terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. The closure of industries led not only to large-scale job losses but also to a shrinkage of institutionalized social space, the habitations of secular social interaction. A steady withdrawal of the state from its welfare functions in postcolonial society further contracted the space of social equality maintained by the right to collective bargaining in the formal industrial sector. The divergence between democracy and equality marked this moment of transition and led to the emergence of an ethnoreligious political culture.

Collective identities are not permanent fixtures; they change and have to be reinvented. Referring to the renaming of Bombay, Hansen reminds us of ŽZi?zek’s contention that “proper names do not describe objects or places” (p. 2). It is through naming that the identity of an object is established. Thus “constant reiteration…stabilizes the imputed properties of a place” (p. 2). The need for reiteration implies an inherent instability of naming, and the fragility of identities and calls for public rituals like the ganapatiutsav (worship of elephant-headed Lord Ganesh) or performative practices like the maha aratis (public mass prayers) at the local level to reassert and represent collective identities. In these rituals and performances the role of the Shiv Sena branch leader, or dada, is crucial in sustaining identities and instituting a plebeian political culture.

Hansen argues that the Shiv Sena’s articulation of a plebeian political culture conforms to Partha Chatterjee’s demarcation between civil and political society (pp. 229-230). Whereas the former comprises the realm of rule-governed negotiations in a legal framework, the latter domain consists of a more chaotic process of negotiations contesting “existing rule in the broadest sense … to make a community or cause as visible as possible in order to claim certain benefits, public services or entitlements” (p. 230). It is this expansive realm of populist protest that organizations like the Shiv Sena inhabit, deploying a language of demonstrative violence as part of their political culture. Such mobilizations speak to a fracture in India’s postcolonial polity; Hansen has innovatively mapped its contours for Mumbai.