In this exploration of peoples’ relationship to land in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea, Alan Rumsey and James Weiner propose an innovative analytical strategy for comparativist projects. As Rumsey explains in his introduction, this strategy is modeled on the way that the Ku Waru of the New Guinea Highlands inventively pair unrelated entities and categories to highlight otherwise unrecognized shared semantic features. The editors of this volume aim similarly to reveal meaningful commonalities by juxtaposing “Aboriginal Australia” and “New Guinea”--two categories that anthropologists have historically employed to construct distinct discursive traditions within their discipline. Rather than working from the premise that Aboriginal Australia and New Guinea exemplify contrasting social or culture types or arguing that they represent the same generalizable structural form, the editors have organized this collection around the observation that thematic elements in the anthropological discourses about each region could be brought into productive relationship. The resulting volume is a richly intertextual but cohesive collection of ethnographic comparisons.

The essays by Alan Rumsey, Jürg Wassmann, Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Deborah Bird Rose, James Weiner, Eric Kline Silverman, and Lissant Bolton best exemplify Ku Waru-style “pairing” (p. 4) as a comparative method. Rather than attempt to cover each of these contributions, however, I will give a sense of what this method can achieve through discussion of three representative essays.

Rumsey, author of the first essay as well as the introduction, traces the ways in which anthropologists working in Aboriginal Australia and Melanesia have come to focus increasingly on the grounding of cosmology and social identity in landscape. Employing the recent work of other ethnographers, he elicits commonalities and differences among topographic processes in five contexts – two in Australia and three in Melanesia – by mapping them according to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of rhizomatic, nonhierarchical, acentered connectivity. Although Rumsey’s examples show Deleuze and Guattari’s contrast between rhizomatic and arborescent sociospatial forms to be overdrawn, he nevertheless urges anthropologists to attend to and develop this contrast as an important, relatively untapped, source of theoretical insight.

Stewart and Strathern take as their point of departure the observation that in both Hagen (Papua New Guinea) and Arnhem Land (Australia) there is an “overall strong identification of people with land, through notions of ancestrality, substance, revealed power, and the need to renew fertility by ritualized access to power” (p. 80). Against the backdrop of these phenomena--which other contributors also show to be characteristic of the regions under study--they develop a heuristic dichotomy between two types of mythic narrative. By stressing historical human agency, “creation stories” foster relatively fluid connections between people and land; conversely, by depicting events that establish a permanent state of affairs, “origin stories” foster relatively stable connections (p. 79). Although both types of narrative are recognizable in each context, Stewart and Strathern argue that Hagerners foreground creations whereas the Yolngu of Arnhem Land stress origins. These inverse emphases emerge as key differences in the formulation of contemporary land claims in the two ethnographic contexts.

Rumsey casts the growing anthropological interest in “the role of tracks and traces and the local groundedness of cosmology” as a productive response to the current disciplinary disinclination “to model cultures or societies as totalizing, internally coherent systems” (p. 37). In so doing, he appears to align himself with that disinclination. Although this position, especially when combined with the method of pairing that Rumsey proposes, can easily lead to decontextualized typological comparisons, Rose demonstrates that close attention to the ways in which two peoples structure their understandings of the cosmos as a whole facilitates a systematic contrast that highlights divergent cultural processes. She achieves this by framing her contribution in terms of the systems of responsibility “that humans hold in relation to nonhumans” (p. 99). The Victoria River District people of the Northern Territory (Australia) regenerate living things through what Rose terms “intentional action” (p. 104), that is, everyday practices performed under the cultural premise that all things are interdependent. Victoria River people see their environment as characterized by intersubjectivity and “pervasive mutuality” (p. 114) between humans and nonhumans, including trees, rocks, and hills. In the interplay of “multicentered subjectivities” (p. 110), all life unfolds out of interdependent sites through “relationships of responsible care” (p. 110). In New Britain (Papua New Guinea), however, instead of such relations of reciprocity, the Kaulong face the continual burden of differentiating themselves from a self-perpetuating forest world. This burden, Rose argues, entails a diminished human responsibility for most nonhuman species.

Instructive as these theoretically contingent pairings clearly are, the editors seem aware that they may be seen to lack sufficient motivation for comparison and replicable criteria of selection. Rumsey thus offers a second rationale for this comparative study that arguably returns to more traditional notions of sociospatial continuity. He stresses geographical proximity, intersecting histories, and cognate mythologies to identify the main insight precipitated from the contributions to this volume: in New Guinea and Aboriginal Australia “there is a kind of spatialization of knowledge that goes hand in hand with knowledge of places” (p. 12). This complementarity between place and knowledge, Weiner further argues in the afterword, is an important dimension of sociality in the two regions. It is at this general level that the two regions are taken to exemplify a particular cultural type. A certain tension inheres in the book, therefore, between a comparative method based on the parallel viewing of analytically heterogeneous regions and one that recognizes a diachronic relationship between them. Nevertheless, Emplaced Myth is a success as a comparison of two recognized ethnographic regions, for it is one of few edited volumes of its kind in which most of the contributors engage intentionally in the comparative endeavor.

How do humans use visual aspects of the (archaeological) past to support theories of history and value? Although this is the underlying question historian Donald Malcolm Reid and anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj each considers, their resultant texts are strikingly dissimilar in ways that transcend the disciplinary divide. Writing on the roles of science in constructing arguments for grounded histories within a region marked by long-standing territorial conflicts, each author seems to answer questions raised by the other.

Abu El-Haj claims to trace the "articulation of the colonial and national projects" (p. 4) within archaeology's role in the Jewish settlement and historical reconstruction of Palestine. Focusing on what she refers to as the observable qualities of excavated objects, Abu El-Haj attempts throughout her book to demonstrate how "(social) science generates facts or phenomena, which refigure what counts as true or real" (p. 11). In contrast, Reid methodically plots the interactions of social, political, and personal histories that resulted in the creation of a modern Egypt. Despite its title, Reid's book is not focused on pharaohs as the defining element in Egyptian colonial and postcolonial history. Reid compiles data on the roles of local and international participants in Egypt's multiple histories--Greco-Roman, Coptic, and Islamic as well as pharaonic--and one of his primary goals is to highlight how those histories have been integrated into the concept of the modern nation.

One extremely valuable feature of Reid's book is an excellent set of illustrations, ranging from political cartoons to frontispieces of older texts, photographs to Orientalist art. Reid also provides useful appendices summarizing data referred to in the text (e.g., nationalities of travel-book writers, conference participants, and tourists). Reid uses these bodies of data, and the text supporting them, to provide a novel account of how colonial governments, imperialist European governments, archaeologists and collectors, tourists, looters, and others together produce ideas, monuments, and documents that contribute to popular understandings of Egypt and Egyptian history.

Although both Abu El-Haj and Reid discuss colonialist agendas, the two authors treat the subject quite differently. In chapter 2 of her book, Abu El-Haj considers the connections between cartography and British and European colonialism. Beyond this cursory examination of colonial interests, she never analyzes the influence European (and later U.S.) imperialist agendas might have had on the production of a history of Israel/Palestine. She does not consider, for example, Britain’s reliance on Palestinian excavations as a way of defining Britain and its colonial strength (that is, meeting Britain’s need to uncover the historical foundations of its own modernity to compete scientifically with the French, who were at that point firmly in charge of Egyptology). Reid's account is much more engrossing, as he considers at great length the various interests of French, German, British, and Ottoman politicians, landed officials, and archaeologists in the struggles for control of the scientific production of Egypt's past. Reid clarifies various colonial-imperialist agendas in Egypt using anecdotes, citations, historical data, and (to a lesser degree) analyses of this information. He emphasizes the roles of individual Egyptians in shaping archaeology and the presentation of the past through museums, talks, and expositions, and he delineates individual Europeans’ roles in opening (or closing) the door for those Egyptians.

Of the two books, Abu El-Haj's provides a clearer, if occasionally repetitive, narrative. Her text is also accessible to a wider audience, both because of the broader themes with which she engages--the political nature of science, how science can "operate as a metaphor for specific national and political values and commitments" (p. 274), how territorial conflicts such as those in Israel/Palestine can through science be grounded in observable fact--and because she is much more careful to define unfamiliar terms.

Reid provides a more even-handed account of the production of Egypt as a nation, in part because he considers more actors and provides a broader context for their actions. This said, part 1 of Reid’s book suffers from too much information and overwhelming organizational problems; nonspecialists will find it difficult to struggle through much of the first half of the book. A glossary seems necessary yet is not provided. Part 2 of Reid's work is much clearer. He organizes each chapter around a specific aspect of the Egyptian past (Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Islamic, Coptic) and the individual characters involved in the historical production of that past for Egyptian and international publics. By presenting the histories, influences, and goals of different actors, and their interactions and conflicts with one another, Reid creates a broad picture of how the idea of Egypt was constructed, something Abu El-Haj fails to do for Israel/Palestine, given her near-exclusive focus on changing Israeli political agendas. Reid also presents personal and political motivations and interests far more straightforwardly than does Abu El-Haj.

In most of her book, Abu El-Haj provides clear examples of how specific instances of archaeological production—survey and excavation projects, museum organization, tour presentations—produce history, justify social practice, and underwrite political decisions and frameworks. For example, in chapter 4, Abu El-Haj contends that, in (re)mapping and (re)naming objects and places within the Palestinian landscape, the Israeli government not only linked those objects and places to popular ideas of biblical history, but also reaffirmed what constituted history. In chapter 5, Abu El-Haj delineates some of the problems inherent in equating artifacts with ethnic groups--pots with peoples--and shows how such an approach renders invisible broader implications (i.e., that attention focuses only on certain aspects and moments of the archaeological past--in this case, those that strengthen arguments for the historicity of the Israeli state). In chapter 6, she shows that such processes of equation lead to circularities within historical arguments (p. 146): interpretations of archaeological finds are based on "prior…narratives…[that] presupposed a paradigm of and for history itself" (p. 136). She concedes that individual archaeologists may not be aware of their own biases, replicating existing circularities rather than acting to produce them (p. 161). In chapter 7, she demonstrates how "overlapping fields of practice--legal, military, political, and scholarly (archaeology, architecture, urban planning, museum design)--fabricated both history and historicity" (p. 199), or what is understood to be history and to hold value as history. All of these interwoven arguments are well laid out and well documented.

Although Abu El-Haj considers a broad range of perspectives on topics such as the political agendas behind efforts to preserve historical monuments and to spark interest in a national archaeological past, in far too much of the book she relates opposing official positions, offering only brief comments, taken from other publications, on the attitudes of the various publics within the Palestine/Israeli territory. In chapters 8 and 9, Abu El Haj includes more direct ethnographic data to support her arguments, but again, these are from outside the contexts of archaeological production. For example, Abu El-Haj speaks not with archaeologists who are excavating, but with archaeologists on tours given in conjunction with international archaeological congresses. The reader gets no sense of how local residents influenced, were influenced by, or responded to the legislation resulting from official perspectives. Nor does Abu El-Haj discuss the question of audience: to whom were archaeologists’ appeals for valuing history being made? Via what communicative media? Were there any public responses? If, as she claims, science can be and is used to support particular political arguments and agendas, then it is also capable of supporting counterarguments, something Reid suggests throughout his history of Egyptian archaeology.

If Abu El-Haj is concerned with explaining how archaeology "emerged as particularly powerful and pervasive" (p. 6) and her interpretation insists that archaeology's power relies on producing "facts that can be seen" or "embodied" (p. 15 and passim), then she needs to relate the point of view of the audiences perceiving those "facts on the ground." My primary objection to the work as a whole is that there is no ethnographic representation of either the Israeli-Jewish or the Palestinian publics whose lives are affected by the subject matter of the book. At the heart of the issues that make Abu El-Haj’s contribution so potentially valuable are the question of the production of modern Israel, and more broadly, the underlying question of how paradigms of history born of ideological positions both guide and become instantiated through scientific studies that support both the paradigms and the ideology, yet how the scientific nature of those studies renders the underlying politics opaque. A more straightforward account of how individuals living within the territory being claimed through Israeli nationalist-archaeological practice respond to, adopt, or contest the production of history would make her claims far more compelling. Although it is possible that Abu El-Haj's political, religious, or academic position prevented her from collecting such data, or from presenting it without endangering her interlocutors, her failure to clarify her own position within the ethnographic context renders her representations of archaeology even more unclear.

Both books are of interest to those studying the political history of the region. Reid's book is an excellent reference text for those concerned with various aspects of the production of history in Egypt, whether today or in the past, but it is too specialized for the casual reader. Abu El-Haj provides an important and timely look at some of the politics of self-representation behind the Israeli government's public face, within a broader argument about science's capacity for political involvement and for maintaining and even advancing colonialist policies. However, I reiterate that her failure to present either official Palestinian or public Palestinian/Israeli opinions and attitudes within the context of Israel's (settler) nationalist-archaeological discipline means that answers to the excellent questions she raises are never made clear.

Scholars have long maintained that Inca civilization was unique because of its lack of a writing system. That dogma is now being challenged in a groundbreaking volume edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton.

The issue under consideration is the degree of narrativity of the khipu, an object made of dyed strings knotted and hung from a horizontal cord. The khipu is well known as the device used by Inca accountants (khipucamayoq) for numerically recording human, animal, plant, and other resources. New research strongly suggests that some khipu facilitated the oral performance of dynastic history, poetry, speeches, and songs by their owners and makers.

But was this writing? Were khipu read (did they display a grammatical ordering of words able to be orally reproduced by any literate person) or were they consulted? Gary Urton explains khipu as “general signifiers evoking classes of objects, actions, places and times … [that] were given more nuanced form and substance by a khipucamayoq who would have brought to the [performance] information retained in his memory, as well as a range of creative, discursive practices for producing a narrative appropriate to a given place and perhaps audience” (p. 20). No unanimous conclusion is reached in this volume, but all contributors concur that information was encoded on khipu by means of patterned variation in the material used (the color of strings; their dyeing, spinning, and plying; the type and number of knots).

Gary Urton, Tristan Platt, and Rosaleen Howard each consider the relationship between language and khipu. Urton emphasizes that the syntactic, semantic, and overall grammatical properties of Quechua and Aymara are a necessary starting point for studying narrative khipu because “these were the languages that gave coherence and structure to the thinking, logic, and communication among local, regional, and imperial officials … who constructed these devices in the first place” (p. 192). Platt calls attention to regional variation in the cultural ordering of ethnocategories across the Andes and therefore in widely dispersed khipu. Howard suggests that the organizational principles of Quechua narrative performance and the structure of the Quechua language are compatible with creating and reading a narrative khipu.

Various authors interrogate the relationship between khipu and memory. Carlos Sempat Assadourian suggests that the Inca victor of a civil war killed as many khipucamayoq of the defeated claimant to the throne as could be found and had all their khipu burned. Khipu facilitated lawsuits of Andean communities against their Spanish colonial overlords (Tristan Platt). Under forced religious conversion Andean people recontextualized their khipu as pseudo-rosaries (Regina Harrison). Eventually, the colonial regime ordered all khipu destroyed. As Jeffrey Quilter trenchantly observes, “The control of information and information makers was the key to power” (p. 212).

William Conklin proposes an “information string theory” by which sequential narration could be accomplished in khipu construction. Maria Ascher demonstrates that the concept of numbers as labels is fundamental in decoding khipu; the formatting of numerical information provides the narrative frame for the khipu’s narrative content. Jeffrey Quilter makes a brilliant comparison between the telegraph, stenography, and khipu. He argues that "without any means of rapidly recording language as it was spoken or sung, the Inka would have had to rely on memory in order to later record the [spoken] texts as khipu" (p. 208). Robert Ascher claims that Inca khipu fit into “the concept of a writing group” (p. 105). He also calls attention to the simultaneous tactile, visual, vocal, and auditory acts involved in khipu performance.

Tristan Platt and Frank Salomon deal with colonial and contemporary khipu use in Bolivia and Peru, respectively. Platt exhorts scholars to contextualize khipu in “the living social context in which they were created and transformed as changing social objects” (p. 230). Salomon emphasizes khipu as accumulative histories corresponding to multiple makers and events, thereby containing components of differing date; he emphasizes “use-life.” Salomon interprets the display of “patrimonial” khipu (khipu that can no longer be read) in the community he studied as “currently functioning documents of civil legitimacy” (p. 295) and the “records of the minimal corporate constituents of a society” that “symbolize local autochthony,” unlike the imperial contexts of archaeological khipu (p. 299).

On the basis of ethnographic comparison Carol Mackey suggests that the khipu found by archaeologists in ancient tombs might have been copies of originals that remained in use.

Narrative Threads is one of the most intellectually exciting books I have read in recent years. It should be mandatory reading for archaeologists and ethnohistorians studying the Andes. It has keen significance for the readers of this journal interested in history and memory, discourse and knowledge, colonial resistance, cultural production, materiality, and performance.

In Life and Death on Mt. Everest, Sherry Ortner delivers a compelling historical ethnography and analysis of Himalayan mountaineering in Nepal. The author covers the 80 years or so of both European and Sherpa attempts to scale Nepal’s mountains. She relies on over three decades of fieldwork in the region, coupled with a sympathetic review of the large mountaineering literature. In pairing mountaineering and ethnography, Ortner skillfully brings together two “serious games” (p. 21), each of which consummates its singular sort of risk in a memorial act of writing. Consequently, in Life and Death on Mt. Everest the epic of mountaineering is combined with the epic of trying to make sense of its practices and literature.

Ortner offers a bicultural answer to the puzzling question “Why climb Mt. Everest?” deftly filling the space left behind by George Mallory’s famously empty signifier: “Because it’s there.” At the same time, she writes a straightforward moral critique of mountaineers, trekkers, and travelers who have typically orientalized and subordinated Sherpas and too frequently exploited them.

The pursuit of two theoretical objectives focus the ethnography. First, Ortner unravels familiar ethnic and gender stereotypes to yield the complexity that they compress and dissemble. She fractures Europeans’ view of Sherpas as unspoiled, naïve, intractable, and infantile, revealing instead Sherpas who carry, Sherpas who climb, Sherpas who themselves hire and organize, and Sherpa women, some of whom now climb high. Similarly, the Europeans of this book are neither quintessential dominators nor comic-strip heroes.

Europeans first arrived in Khumbu as militaristic, massively equipped, would-be conquerors of Everest and as enforcers of a paternalistic hierarchy. On these expeditions Sherpas tended to be cast in the role of low-paid servants. By the 1960s, however, Europeans began to travel to Khumbu as mountaineering representatives of the counterculture, lightly equipped for Alpine ascents and cognitively and morally equipped for reciprocity with the mountain and with their Sherpa employees. Today, Sherpas are recruited as proper members of expeditions. In addition, from the 1960s onward, European women have climbed on Everest both in all-women teams and together with men (the feminist aspect of women’s mountaineering is well covered in the book). Other identity ascents besides first woman have taken place: first black person, first Sherpa woman, first Jew. Finally, breaking from the critical spirit of European mountaineering, commercially minded European climbers brought “yuppie mountaineers” (p. 283) to the thin air of Everest, with tragic consequences in 1996.

Ortner, however, wants history to do more than expose the usual stereotypes; she desires anthropology to be more than the cultural text that damns these stereotypes. History in Life and Death on Mt. Everest is relational and representational, configured and periodized. The main actors are animated by questing, restless identities, identities shaped and guided by deeper contradictions in social structure. In making her second theoretical point, Ortner argues that identities are patterned and determined but at the same time practiced as sources of transforming agency. They are determined and yet determining. This famous antinomy has, of course, been an enduring focus of Sherry Ortner’s anthropological paradigm. Here, its resolution turns on the author’s comprehension of a contact that is neither a simple narrative of power and resistance nor a forlorn story of a dying Sherpa culture, contaminated by the materialism of arrogant Westerners.

Ortner replaces these two familiar tales with analysis of the transforming cultural practices that collide and mesh to make contact constitutive. Ortner views the context of Himalayan mountaineering, for the most part, as a space in which climbing Europeans subordinate Sherpas to a singular project that dialectically combines romantic rejections of materialism with the worship of technology and fervent goal orientation that romanticism normally eschews. In this situation, the Europeans’ exercise of power is never purely benevolent and never solely a willful exercise in domination. Similarly, recruited to this alien project, Sherpas appropriate and append mountaineering to the indigenous pursuit of becoming Sherpa men of stature, both inside and outside of the monasteries. They bring to mountaineering the beliefs, forms, and gestures of both high and low Khumbu Buddhism. Moreover, when Sherpa women begin climbing, they do so by stretching the elasticity of indigenous values, not by breaking free of them. Sherpas extract from, project onto, and constantly inflect the practice of Himalayan mountaineering both in responding to the dialectic of reciprocity and hierarchy and in mapping its scenarios onto the extraordinary sphere of climbing. Indeed, in the author’s general view of this contact, Sherpa actors realize the inner potential of the indigenous projects that define them by encompassing projects of the Other.

Life and Death on Mt. Everest, is a worthy sequel to the author’s High Religion (Princeton University Press, 1989) and a good companion to the analytical accounts of contact written, for example, by Sahlins (Historical Metaphors, Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom, University of Michigan Press, 1981) and Schieffelin and Crittendon (Like People You See in a Dream. First Contact in Six Papuan Societies, Stanford University Press, 1991). Sherry Ortner’s uniquely detailed and complex appreciation of exactly where Sherpas are coming from, as well as where they are currently heading, helps explain what Sherpas have made of mountaineering in the past; what mountaineering has made of them; and, finally, how Sherpas have begun to reorient themselves toward mountaineering in the new century.

This is an accessible, concise survey of the disruption and dispossession of the religious life of North American indigenous peoples caused by Euro-American domination. In the first chapter, Jeffrey Niezen introduces his aim to reveal the hidden complexity of "social forces behind spiritual change" and thus demystify the outsider's gaze that totalizes modern Native American ritual as ahistorical and consensually authentic (p. 1). Beneath this presentism, he argues, are powerful, enduring tensions generated during the "age of nation building" in North America. Drawing mainly on the existing literature, Niezen moves from the older forces of Christian missionization and state-imposed assimilation to the less obvious, more recent forces of biomedicine, New Age appropriation, and archaeological-ethnographic "culture collecting" itself. Using the format of many texts on Native American history, Niezen follows each chapter with a brief narrative supplying an indigenous perspective.

Overall Niezen dissolves a popular, static view with a sober, incisive history of the main ethnocidal effects of domination and the religious changes they engendered. Within this scope, Spirit Wars is ideal for introducing students new in the field to the striking evidence for and durable contradictions within Euro-American-imposed religion, pedagogy, and science. In the ongoing search for course texts, this one stands out among very few that confront rather than handily discard those contradictions. By sharply foregrounding the destructiveness of Euro-American expansion and clearly identifying opposing views on each issue, Niezen provokes new readers to reflect critically on past and current social forces, especially those generally held in a progressive light, such as formal education, biomedicine, liberal social programs, and social science itself.

As social scientific inquiry, however, Spirit Wars contains no major breakthroughs toward analyzing the contradictions of domination and the complexity of religious change. The question of what theoretical orientation will be employed to identify and analyze deeper social forces remains unanswered, and Niezen fails to place the book within the vast literature on relevant topics. Furthermore, the author proposes to reveal all modes of domination as manifestations of a deeper religious conflict or "spirit war," yet he never fully articulates this reduction. Some particular clarification is needed for how Niezen, in seeking the religious ground for Euro-American domination, departs from and advances beyond Vine Deloria's classic work God Is Red, (Grosset and Dunlap, 1973). The result is a detached anthropological perspective that presumes an inclusive overview of generic perspectives in conflict. This increasingly familiar anthropological parallax objectifies but does not penetrate multiple outside and inside views on moral, legal, and religious issues. Once at this juncture, there are two ways to transcend mere description. One is reflection on the contradictions involved in practicing anthropology itself. Niezen thankfully avoids a total commitment to this path, but the question remains as to how his own inquiry breaks from the dominant social forces of knowledge production it objectifies. A second option is to intensively analyze perspectives and practices at multiple levels. Eluding this, Niezen's conceptualization of the social forces hovers in generality.

Most notably, Niezen does not fully engage the complexities of local knowledge. Although he offers glances at some local particulars, he eludes or oversimplifies the lived contradictions ever present to indigenous peoples. Native American discourses and practices have long tried to make sense of and propose strategies to reckon with the contradictions of Euro-American domination. Thus, the issues Niezen presents from a national frame of reference are neither identical in form nor equal in intensity to those affecting indigenous communities at the local level. He mentions some divergence among inside views, such as that between tribal political authority and ritual leadership (p. 7) or between elders and younger generations (p. 2), but what exactly are the social forces generating these differences? Excluded or only mentioned are such issues as the spread of fundamentalist Christian missions on reservations, language loss and renewal, conflicting definitions of identity, the rapid expansion of pan-Indian neotraditions, the tumultuous relationship between money and religion in indigenous political economies, stresses generated by mass popular culture, and multiple, often overlapping, forms of factionalism. Indeed, these issues can be more disruptive and destructive than national-level controversies.

In concluding, Niezen concedes confusion about the sources of the past and present cultural genocide accompanying religious change. He recognizes that the social forces are many and complex and declares that responsibility remains difficult to assign. In the final chapter he hints at the possibility of a dialectical approach for relating externally imposed forces of domination to self-destructive forces inside communities. Niezen further divides external forces of domination into malicious and philanthropic forms, both of which, he argues, sustain unrealizable missions for indigenous peoples. Thus, there is an "uncompromising exercise of domination" (p. 228) regardless of the content or intentions of the Euro-American ideologies engaged. This is a valuable point, but the question remains as to how this dialectic works in the terms Niezen delimits. How are the larger forces behind, say, biomedicine, repatriation, or cultural appropriation tied to specific self-destructive processes, such as suicide, chemical dependency, violence, or crime? In the end, one is left with the sense that domination is a diffuse, even ethereal, power emanating from everywhere but nowhere in particular in Euro-American society. This problem can be resolved by study of the concrete social relations of dominance constructed and reproduced in local contexts, as well as research on the great diversity of local modes of empowerment throughout the continent.

For its attempt to grasp such a complex process, though, Spirit Wars deserves serious attention by all investigators of domination. Niezen’s description of the dialectic between Euro-American domination and Native American responses, creative as well as self-destructive, is indeed a valuable resource for understanding expansive power over the long duration.

Post-Soviet Chaos is a fine-grained ethnography of the changes occurring in post-Soviet Kazakhstan as they are understood by those persons most adversely affected by the introduction of capitalism: the dispossessed. Joma Nazpary provides the reader with a look into the everyday life of a society that, like many other postsocialist countries, is often defined in the Western general media in terms of transition success and failure. In bringing to light the voices of those he terms the dispossessed, the author intends to counterbalance the dominant, Western mode of explaining away the negative impacts of such transitions as evidence of the lack of development of the society or culture in question and of the country's need for Western aid and intervention. In contrast to this view, Nazpary argues that the development of the chaotic circumstances in Kazakhstan must be understood in relation to capitalism's inner contradictions and global expansion: in other words, as already a result of Western intervention in the form of globalization (p. 3). His ethnography is an account of the practices and categories with which certain Kazakh local actors make sense of Kazakhstan's transition from socialism as well as of the West's role in these changes.

Nazpary argues that the collapse of the Soviet system brought with it the distintegration of Kazakh society into two social networks: that of a rich elite minority and that of the dispossessed. The author works from the definition of the dispossessed developed by Caroline Humphrey to refer to those persons who have been deprived of the property, work, and entitlements they had received under socialism (p. 14). The emergence of these two social networks was a result of the former communist elite's response to the crisis of hegemony of the Soviet system. Far from suffering the loss of the Soviet system's ideological and moral authority, the former elites managed to regroup and ultimately accumulate even greater power and wealth by implementing what Nazpary defines as a “chaotic mode of domination” (pp. 6-7). This term refers to a new balance of power formed by two interlocking networks of the elite--holders of high offices in new government institutions and members of informal networks of influence--and the ability of these elite networks to arbitrarily exercise power over the entire population in spite of democratic reforms.

For Nazpary, the dispossessed are defined as much as by their having lost certain elemental benefits provided under the Soviet system as by their having been compelled under existing circumstances to assume new social strategies, obligations, and social relations (p. 14). The core of Nazpary’s book is an analysis of the main characteristics of Kazakh post-Soviet chaos as they are understood by the dispossessed and the range of strategies these social actors developed to survive in the face of this chaos. Individual chapters address the interlocking elements of the dispossessed's understanding of and reactions to chaos, including how the process of wealth differentiation through privatization is understood as plunder, the drastic increase of domestic and public violence, the development and operation of new social networks, women's practice of economic sexual strategies, ethnic tension, and the construction of Soviet and Western identities.

Nazpary's in-depth research among the numerous social networks he encountered during his fieldwork in the Kazakh city of Almaty enables him to provide grounded analyses of certain issues that in postsocialist societies are often addressed in an abstract or standardized manner. One of the strongest points of his analysis is the way he is able to illuminate the complex relations between women's new sexual strategies under Kazakh capitalism, ethnic tension, and the construction of an idealized Soviet identity. Nazpary does not address the issue of gender simply to include women in his ethnography. Addressing the cultural importance ascribed to gendered practices enabled the author to identify the cultural bases for a dichotomy that has developed between an idealized Soviet identity and the construction of capitalism and capitalists (domestic or foreign) as alien. By taking into account the social role of Soviet-alien opposition, Nazpary provides an alternative analysis of the ethnic tensions among Kazakhs as well as between Kazakhs and non-Kazakhs, which has often been described as the inevitable result of the clash between cultures (p. 182).

Nazpary's argument that the chaos in Kazakhstan is due in large part to capitalism's global expansion, epitomized by U.S. imperialism (p. 3), and to the complicity between the local elite and the West is, however, far less grounded. This is to some degree the result of Nazpary's almost exclusive focus on the dispossessed, which has enabled him to shed light on issues whose analysis has been until now hampered by almost ideological conceptions of the differences between socialism and capitalism. Although Nazpary's assertion that Kazakh social reality should be addressed as part of the global capitalist system is indisputable, his analytic approach should be expanded to address such an assertion ethnographically. This drawback aside, Nazpary's work is an important and welcome contribution to the literature on Kazakhstan and other post-Soviet societies as well as a valuable resource for those interested in the effects of capitalism's expansion across the globe.

Montgomery’s main argument in this book is that child prostitution cannot be fully understood unless children are considered as social agents capable of making their own choices rather than as objects of compassion and concern. Montgomery wishes to move beyond what she terms “the deviance paradigm” to contribute to an anthropological redefinition of sexuality, culture, and ontology. The recent dramatic transformation of child prostitution from a local concern to an internationally debated issue is closely linked, Montgomery argues in chapter 1, to the lobbying and campaigning of ECPAT (End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism), an offshoot of the Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism. The growing iconic status of child prostitutes has led to much myth and stereotyping, feeding moral outrage and public desire for sensationalism. A deeper understanding of the issue requires that the children concerned and the context in which they live be brought into the analysis. In chapter 2, Montgomery deconstructs the Western-centered model of childhood innocence that informs opinions held in the West on children’s sexuality and argues that childhood in rural Thailand departs from this model. She also discusses issues such as the universality of moral standards and human rights, differences in childrearing between the Thai middle classes and the rural population, and the economic role of children in the countryside. Chapters 3 to 5 contain the body of the anthropological data, gathered from children in Baan Nua, a tiny community of 14 households located near one of Thailand’s tourist resorts. Child prostitution is the community’s main source of income. The figures are appalling: Of the 26 largely self-selected prostitutes whom Montgomery interviewed, 11 were under ten years of age, four of these between four and six. Facing hostility from the community, Montgomery gathered the bulk of her data during interviews with the children while they attended an NGO-run center away from the slum. Additional information on some of the parents, clients, and pimps enabled her to sketch a complex picture of children’s relationships evolving around identity, kinship, status, merit, and religious beliefs. The children testify to their having not merely broken lives, as the media outcry suggests, but also hopes and a vision of their future. Montgomery concludes that “prostitution, for the children themselves, is not an issue of morality versus immorality but of turning a socially unacceptable form of earning into a way of fulfilling their familial obligations” (p. 157).

A book on this topic cannot fail to raise many questions, and this is Montgomery’s major contribution. Why speak of “child prostitutes” when the children do not emphasize this aspect of their lives but see themselves “as dutiful daughters, sisters, or grandchildren, who should be admired rather than pitied or patronised” (p. 11)? The stereotype “child prostitutes” contradicts Montgomery’s intention to put children’s perspectives and self-representations at the center of her research. It also leads her into the methodological pitfall of using the stereotype to select her research population, artificially limiting the scope of research to the children she herself suspects of prostitution and jeopardizing the depth of her analysis. The relation between economic calculation and morality is equally problematic. For Montgomery, if children sell their bodies, it is simply because “they can and because prostitution is, and always will be, an industry that lays a premium on youth” (p. 48). But not all children in Baan Nua prostitute themselves: some do not work at all, and others work as street vendors, beggars, refuse collectors, or in sweatshops. The fact that the income from these jobs is so much lower than what can be earned in prostitution raises the question of why not all children in the community prostitute themselves. An answer to this question would have substantiated Montgomery’s claim that children’s work, whether in prostitution or outside of it, is essentially a matter of economic calculation and therefore morally neutral. The fact that many of the younger children were not articulate and “did not have the vocabulary to discuss what they did” (p. 73) raises doubts about these children’s capacity for making economic calculations. Montgomery’s presupposition that economic calculation is morally neutral is equally debatable, as it is mostly siblings and mothers who sell these young children into prostitution to opt out of it themselves. No doubt this is sound economic calculation, but that does not make it morally neutral. And what about the calculations of the clients who the older children and parents regard as friends and benefactors? Attributing to children who work as prostitutes agency and the capacity to make economic calculations cannot clearly replace a sound theoretical framework on exploitative practices and how they are reproduced both across generations and at the level of society.

Montgomery addresses an extremely sensitive and challenging topic. Her book contains a useful discussion of previous work on the topic of child prostitution and is supported by a case study that gives us an inside glimpse, however limited, of child prostitutes’ social world. The effort is commendable and useful for those who wish to carry it one step further. Future researchers will need to deal, both at the level of theory and of research methodology, with the ways childhoods outside the Western world are not only constructed as deviant but also fragmented into stereotypical media items, NGO targets, and law-and-order-issues.

The title of this book, Global Noise, suggests that the musical form of rap is not only internationally enjoyed, appropriated, and produced, but also, like its parent culture hip-hop, “noise”--a politically oppositional cultural form that still exists in its offspring expressions. Some may insist that hip-hop and its musical manifestation rap emanate from and reflect a distinctively urban African American cultural and historical location. Stemming from this notion, then, any nonlocal appropriations of this form would be seen as homogenization, Americanization, or even cultural erosion. In Global Noise, Mitchell presents case studies of hip-hop’s global effects and interpretations, portraying how rap has been embraced and taken up by diverse peoples. The authors claim that the globalization of hip-hop has actually increased musical diversity and now potentially mediates and articulates local cultural concerns. Sometimes hip-hop culture emerges quite altered from its original New York sources, as in Germany (Pennay), whereas in other situations hip-hop is used as a vehicle for indigenous cultural concerns (New Zealand, Mitchell) or as an attention-grabbing political baton (Australia, Maxwell). In England, hip-hop has spawned fresh pop genres like Drum ‘n’ Bass and Breakbeat (Hesmondhalgh and Melville).

I disagree with many of Mitchell’s comments in his introduction, such as his assertion that hip-hop has already “peaked” or had its “golden age,” as well as generalized statements that U.S. hip-hop is showing a dearth of “innovation, surprise, and musical substance” (p. 3). Many of the contributing authors found that some local rap expressions outside the U.S. have also been pop-oriented and unoriginal, and that innovative localized underground scenes can be found in the United States. Mitchell insists that hip-hop’s African Americanness can be explicated from its signification, which I would argue is impossible. He criticizes the hegemony of U.S. rap (in academia and sales figures), but why does he assume that rap music as culture should somehow be immune from the current ubiquitous U.S. cultural, political, media, and economic unidirectional flow?

Despite these theoretical contentions, the book is a long-awaited and necessary addition to the scholarly study of popular musics and their global appropriations and implications. In his introduction, Mitchell has assembled a useful survey of world rap, in which he fills in gaps not covered by chapters in the book. The volume’s authors draw on a diversity of data sources: video, lyrics, rappers themselves, the media, sales statistics. For instance, Condry explores rap clubs, an initial breakdance phase, hip-hop via films, and rap as commodity in Japan, arguing that there is no simple dichotomy between cultural and economic aspects of globalization.

The diversity, creativity, and indigenous voices found in these various rap “scenes” give credit to the sensitivity, rigor, and vision of the contributing authors. Prevos found initial “slavish American imitations” (p. 40) in French rap, yet argues for rap’s natural syncretism with indigenous French wordplay and highlights the complexities of rap’s Afrocentrism for France's mostly ethnically Arab rappers. Chamberland looks at issues facing the rap subculture in Canada, particularly the lack of support or recognition for black Canadian musicians and the success of local and overseas francophone rap in Quebec. Swedenburg shows how three Muslim rap artists in the United Kingdom and France use hip-hop activism to combat “Islamophobia” (p. 57). Levy found that in Bulgaria rappers have mostly emulated U.S. rap styles as part of a wider movement toward Western styles and values. Urla shows how performers in Spain use rap to fuel Basque nationalism and language revival. Morelli shows how in Korea a highly visible group that raps in Korean has come to represent a “new generation.”

Global Noise seems primarily aimed at academics and scholars of popular culture with ample theoretical concern. Although it is highly useful to anthropologists and ethnomusicologists (with more emphasis on culture than music), the book could have been directed more at global hip-hop practitioners themselves, who would enjoy the lyrics, sounds, and stories from their worldwide colleagues and benefit from the politicization the book could provide, which is one of the ultimate goals of hip-hop culture. The few photos and graphics included are wonderful; more would have been welcome.

I would have liked much more exploration of hip-hop as an umbrella cultural form rather than just accenting the singular branch of rap music. There is scant mention of DJ-ing (now a global phenomenon), or breakdancing (which is currently undergoing a renaissance in New Zealand), or aerosol art (which is flourishing in Germany and Australia).

What I find emerging from this inclusive and exhilarating book, however, is the materialization of individual scenes, with their own histories, groups, publications, ethnic complexities, thematic features, and localized politics, rather than mere linguistic differences or unsubstantiated musical distinctions. Rap music has proved itself to be a useful vehicle for global links and local exigencies, generating indigenous hip-hop spaces and adherents, which the editor and contributing authors have thoughtfully considered. Whether this book actually proves that hip-hop is not an Americanizing “global noise” drowning out local song but rather an “example of a vibrant hybridity of contemporary culture” (Condry, p. 225) is now for the reader to discern.

In The Problem of Justice: Tradition and Law in the Coast Salish World Bruce Miller confronts complex, shifting, and often elusive understandings of traditional law and contemporary justice. He provides a welcome contribution to the field of legal anthropology as he delves into the efforts of Coast Salish nations to reinstitutionalize the past in order to shape the future. As he does so, Miller questions the capacity of alternative dispute resolution, court diversion, healing discourses, and harmony ideologies to meet Coast Salish desires for community autonomy.

Miller’s aim “is to historicize the current discourses and to move beyond disempowering, essentializing dialogues in order to help provide a basis for redirecting justice discourses and practices toward localized problems of power relations within communities” (p. 22). He locates the problems of justice in Coast Salish communities divided by the international border but united by shared socioeconomic origins and intermarriage to probe the differing location of aboriginal justice within two state systems of law and justice. Working through three ethnographic case studies--Upper Skagit Justice in the United States and the Stó:lö Nation and the South Island Justice Project in Canada--he examines ten issues in order to delineate the ways discourses of tradition and indigenous justice intersect with current practices and legal circumstances: (1) the ways each system articulates with other aspects of life in the context of each band or tribe, (2) relationships of new justice systems to constituent family groups,(3) the justice models presented as underlying practice, (4) the law-justice concept, (5) ways in which the justice systems are tied to spiritual practices, (6) how “culture bearers” are incorporated into justice processes, (7) paths to the creation of law or code, (8) how systems articulate with the outside world, (9) the “reach” of the systems, and (10) the nature and manner of internal critiques (pp. 38-40).

Before addressing his cases, Miller turns to the “landscape of ideas” (p. 34) to probe the play of three central concepts--tradition, culture, and the sacred--in current justice discourses. Miller shows that the deployment and reception of these concepts vary not only between communities and between communities and the dominant state powers, but also between individuals of the same community. Justice practices emerge with, shape, and are shaped within colonial contexts by primordial narratives and the varied landscape of ideas that has led to internal differentiation along fractures and social divisions varying from and intensifying those of the precolonial eras. Webs of fragmentation place individuals in contrary legal statuses as they seek justice as gendered individuals, spouses, family members, community residents, and citizens of nations and tribes.

Miller’s treatment of the three cases illustrates his central arguments. First he argues that precontact processes of differentiation have been exploited by the colonial state and have become explosively divisive. Second, differentiation has led to wide-ranging views on justice and is reflected in new power relations. Third, justice narratives are grounded in conservative, often Edenic, discourses of the past. Fourth, as tribes present themselves as nations they take on qualities of the state yet fail to allow for meaningful internal critique. Fifth, justice discourses are outward looking and grounded in misleading binary oppositions to the white society. Finally, Miller argues for “sovereignty broad enough to allow not only internal critique but also diversity and change in the understanding and practice of culture” (p. 12). He concludes that primordial narratives obscure individual and family tensions and that healing narratives fail to recognize the relationship of families to tribal governance. This, in conjunction with a lack of community consultation, led to the failure of the South Island Justice Project. The broader scope, wider jurisdiction, and incorporative approach of the Upper Skagit court system, in contrast, provide greater flexibility as it melds narratives of tradition within a new legal code and integrates elders as culture bearers with other justice staff and institutions. Nonetheless, Miller finds “slippage” as elders express personal fears of inadequacy in comparison to the powers extraordinary individuals wielded in the past. The newly instituted Stó:lö Nation’s justice system draws on Maori models operating at the level of the nation while it struggles to respond to demands for family autonomy and privacy. Its potential is unclear as it seeks a path moving it beyond its particular links with Social and Family and Child Services.

The Problem of Justice is a refreshing look at aboriginal justice. Miller’s ethnography is sensitive and nuanced and challenges the discursive underpinnings of aboriginal justice and state practices. Justice takes on new meanings as he links it to power and place and reveals the weaknesses of healing strategies when individuals, women in particular, are asked to submit personal well-being to the collective good in order to resolve social tensions. In sum, aboriginal justice is not a simple matter; in turning to tradition communities confront internal divisions and power struggles that seep into the social, sacred, and mundane realms of everyday life. Efforts to reestablish community harmony can, as with the South Island Justice System, erupt in new tensions and engage the community not in justice but in new struggles to define, control, and act on “true” definitions of culture and tradition. As these struggles move from the internal to the external, from issues of state power and community subordination to tenuous affirmation of internal differences, communities coalesce in and dissolve larger governing units. The ways in which justice workers, anthropologists, and state workers comprehend and respond feed back into the communities themselves. Miller alerts us to the implications of embracing justice dialogues and to the lingering impact of idealistic and primordial narratives that seek harmony in the past and demand such harmony in the face of contemporary diversity and change.

Intended as a sequel to Miller’s previous edited collection concerned with the ethnography of material culture more generally (Material Cultures, University of Chicago Press, 1998), Home Possessions focuses more narrowly on the material culture of the home. Taking readers behind closed doors in London, Norway, Montreal, Romania, Taiwan, and Japan, the contributors’ fine-grained observations of the interactions between individuals and their homes cast a revealing light onto processes of both individual and sociocultural significance. Moving away from the structural and symbolic analyses of the home of the 1960s and 1970s as well as from more recent depictions of the home as a mere expression of its occupants’ values, each essay reveals the home to be a dynamic processual space in which materials and individuals transform each other--sometimes with contradictory results.

The volume is divided somewhat capriciously into three parts, with the major themes of each part recurring throughout the collection. Following Miller’s helpful introduction, the first section, “Mobile Homes,” explores people’s use of homes to create and express identity, reconfigure their relationships, and negotiate life changes. Alison Clarke argues persuasively in her comparative study of middle-class homeowners and state-housing residents in London for a view of the home as an “other” that solidifies and transmits a social view of oneself. Both Pauline Garvey in her essay on furniture reordering in Norway and Jean-Sebastien Marcoux in his examination of residential moves in Montreal demonstrate that it is not the possession of goods so much as their participation in their owners’ ongoing processes of self-definition that creates their emotional resonance. The lack of equivalence between home and material structure is portrayed beautifully by Elia Petridou’s essay on Greek students in London, for whom food serves not only as an evocation of home but also as a model for differences between Greek and British social relationships.

The second section of the book, “Estate Agency,” is organized around the idea that although the material culture of the home at times serves as a means of agency for its inhabitants, that same materiality can form and constrain the possibilities for individual action. Miller’s charmingly written essay spins off from the mythic theme of the haunted house to an analysis of “lesser hauntings” in which the author struggles to come to terms with his own home’s agency and temporality while he simultaneously develops a “larger cosmology of authenticity, truth, negotiation, and identity” with consequences for larger political and moral domains (p. 112). Hecht’s account of the sentimental collections of an elderly Scottish woman living in London demonstrates the interconnections between personal history and a collective sense of the past.

In the final part of the collection, “Building Relationships,” the authors show that the relationship between homes and individuals is rarely free of contradiction. Chang-Kwo Tan’s analysis of marriage and home building among both the traditional and Protestant Christian Paiwan of Taiwan details the fascinating oscillation of identity associated with different “original houses.” Adam Drazin’s essay explores the polysemic significance of wood for urban Romanians amid the broader context of state socialism and its aftermath, and Inge Maria Daniels’s look at “untidy” Japanese houses that defy samurai-inspired standards of domestic order succeeds in placing consumption practices within a wider framework of Japanese modernity and global capitalism.

Despite the overall strength of the collection, readers will find some points with which to argue. First, in the first section of the book there is a curious absence of references to Veblen, despite the relevance of his concept of emulation in the sense of trying to live up to an ideal (as opposed to his related but distinct notion of emulation as striving to outdo one’s peers). The first section of the book would also have benefited from sustained engagement with the larger sociocultural context that makes the role of material culture in individuals’ lives more intelligible. Garvey, for example, argues that moving furniture around the house is emotionally cathartic but doesn’t address the question of why this should be so in contemporary Norway or in the West more generally. A related example is Clarke, Garvey, and Marcoux’s invocation of novelty and change as a vehicle for the expression of agency without attending to the general point that in the contemporary West the obsession with newness signifies the normative dominance of capitalist culture. Third, Miller’s essay on homes as possessors of agency assumes that constraints imposed by materiality have agency, a provocative claim that requires more elaboration given the common identification of agency with purposive action and hence the inapplicability of the term to inanimate objects. Fourth, the book would have been even stronger had it included more studies from non-Western locations.

Despite these quibbles, the book is a significant resource for both researchers and students of material culture as well as an enjoyable read for the voyeuristically inclined. All of the essays are written in a clear and accessible style, making the volume an excellent choice for undergraduate teaching. Having worked on architecture and home decoration in the Arab Middle East, I found that some of the authors’ insights rang true with my own field experiences, whereas others sparked provocative comparative questions. All of the contributors are Miller’s own Ph.D. students, and the success of the book is a testimony both to Miller’s capacity as a facilitator of others’ work as well as to the vibrancy of his students’ research.

Agreeing to write a review is, in its way, akin to going to a book auction. One does not know in advance whether one is going to come away with something that is as obscure as it is unreadable, something worthy that looks nicer on the shelf than in the perusing, or, all too seldom, a masterpiece to treasure. Meeker's new volume is that utter rarity. He does not just break new ground in brilliant fashion but offers too what is likely to remain the definitive statement within it for a generation. Not just this, in a series of beautifully crafted arguments, he presents answers to a whole series of problems that have long troubled students of Turkish society.

A whole conference is needed to debate, argue, sift, and evaluate Meeker's suggestions and conclusions. However, I shall try to outline a few of the general and more specific reasons why they should be regarded as a watershed in our understanding. Modern Turkey, as is well-known, emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The story of the formation of the new nation has been told many times. The crucial question of what was carried over into the Republic from Ottoman society has hardly been touched upon. In part, this may be due to academic fashion, but it is certainly also true that the Republicans themselves preferred to regard the nation as a clean break with the past. It is also true that there really were astonishing innovations. Paul Stirling, for one, right up until the end of his life preferred to stress these rather than think about the possible continuities.

Meeker turns all this upside down. Through a meticulous study of the town of Of (pronounced “off”) on the Black Sea coast he illustrates that highly significant aspects of their social structure, long remarked upon by travellers (such as kinship moeties, “big men,” and so on) may be regarded as being functions of the region's early incorporation into the imperial endeavor. Major family groups from the late Ottoman Empire, he argues, survived into Republican times, and achieved importance within it, right up until the time that he conducted his fieldwork in the 1960s. He then goes further back into the records, and through documentary evidence is able to link these leading families with the unruly Janissary bands that roamed the area before their emasculation in the early 19th century. Thus he is able to demonstrate a quite remarkable level of continuity within the region's dominant social hierarchy.

This argument, fascinating in itself, has wider significance. It suggests that many of our models of the relationship between the Ottoman and the later Republic society are simply wrong: that there was a far greater degree of local participation within the political process than a simple, once-off “top-down” model of the transformation to Republic permits. Meeker also has highly specific suggestions concerning religious conversion and ethnic identity. His model is, simply put, that the topographic isolation of the region, combined with the high population and poor possibilities of further extending the area under cultivation, has always encouraged the population to travel and to interact with the outside world. Though the ethnic and religious populations of the region have historically been very complex, their increased mobility, necessary economically within the modern nation, was vastly facilitated by their collectively adopting orthodox Islamic mores. This helps to explain at once their insistence on seeming pious to the outside world and their care to appear to be particularly assiduous in guarding the honor of their women. The absence of men further explains why women often seem to work harder than males in the region: they really must do so given that the other sex is so often not there to help. The argument, when considered for Turkey as a whole, has one further, crucial implication. It suggests that the imposition of the egalitarian, secular nation-state proved, far from an impediment, an enormous stimulus to the spread of Sunni Islam because an expressly orthodox worldview became the uniform culture, the lingua franca of everyday life, through which fluid interpersonal relations could be achieved in an increasingly mobile but ethnically and religiously diverse society. If valid, at a stroke, Meeker has gone a long way toward solving the paradox of a secular Republic that became increasingly, and uniformly, religious.

Even those who remain sceptical will be unlikely to dismiss with any ease the huge weight of evidence that Meeker has accumulated, though of course there may be many questions. I could not help wondering about the contrasting relations between the Janissary depredations in the area, the pious “Ofians,” and the Bektashis. One reason that the Janissary bands were able to burn villages, destroy mosques, and ignore the seriat courts with such freedom might be precisely because they had an independent internal system of dispute regulation that drew its inspiration from Bektashi holy figures rather than the authorized system. Similarly, I also wondered whether Meeker was sufficiently fastidious in the way that he discusses and rejects traditional social anthropological approaches. He is surely correct to suggest that The Nuer-like lineage structures and mediation did not operate on the Black Sea coast. However, they clearly did (and do) in other parts of Anatolia (particularly in the east), and it is perhaps this difference that explains the comparative ease with which the Black Sea region became part of the Republic, and the contrasting, tragic difficulties that have become evident in the east. This rejection also perhaps leads him to underestimate his own debt to the classical school: In his attention to power, organization, social relations, cause and effect, and meticulous ethnography, he has produced a work that is as fine, and as significant, as anything that appeared in that golden age.

What makes something popular? The contributors to The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture wrestle with the question of the sources and meanings of popularity in contemporary Japan. The goal, as Dolores Martinez says in her introduction, is to provide a sense of what anthropology can say about popular culture and what popular culture tells anthropology about the links between consumerism and national culture.

The volume succeeds because it can be read along a number of different dimensions. Martinez divides the book into sections based on gender (“Male Domain,” “Female Domain,” and “Shifting Boundaries”), but one could also draw connections across the topics in terms of media types (television, film, comic books, and popular press), generational differences (from preschoolers to housewives and salarymen), or global cultures (international sports, television shows, and films).

The volume's range is impressive. The ten worlds explored are, in order of presentation, professional sumo wrestling, boys' television superheroes, the animated film Akira, karaoke singing, girls' comic-book heroines, women's magazines, television dramas, celebrity watching, horse racing, and professional soccer. The authors generally avoid jargon, and each case is enlivened by evocative depictions–the roar of soccer crowds, the nervousness of a karaoke singer, and the drama of horse racing when the underdog wins.

The authors take an anthropological approach, in that they unpack the symbolism of the different phenomena and relate these worlds of popular culture to changing social contexts. I often wanted to hear more from the consumers and more about the economic contexts of production, but the contributors effectively provide the outsider with a sense of how an insider is likely to interpret and enjoy each of these complex worlds.

In the introduction to part 1, Martinez describes some useful theoretical approaches for the anthropological analysis of popular culture, particularly in terms of gender and globalization. She argues that the anthropologist’s job is in part to explore the relationship between symbolic culture and material culture. She questions “most Westerners’” image of Japan as “a homogeneous society, where hierarchy and formality continue to be important” (p. 2). Yamaguchi Masao discusses the current popularity of sumo, showing connections with ancient East Asian cosmologies as well as the modern mass media of television and manga (comic books).

Part 2, “The Male Domain,” starts young. Tom Gill looks at programs for preschool boys (ages three to six) and examines how "old beliefs find expression in the superheroes and monsters of Japanese television" (p. 33). Superman may go it alone, but Ultraman is helped by family members. Gill examines in detail the symbolism of the color coding of the many Power Rangers, noting, for example, that when exported to the United States and Britain, the colors take on an ethnic significance (pp. 38-45). He also notes that when young viewers talk about the Power Rangers TV show among their peers, the main activity seems to be mastery of classificatory knowledge, an impulse, he suggests, that may be universal (p. 51). Isolde Standish provides a nuanced reading of the animated film Akira (1988), which is set in a postapocalyptic future. The movie follows a young biker thug who develops extraordinary telekinetic powers; Standish explores the movie’s historical references and its relationship to Japan's motorcycle gangs. Known as bôsôzoku (literally, violent speed tribe), these gangs embody resistance to mainstream culture; but, at the same time, they desire to be seen in the media. Bill H. Kelly debunks national character interpretations of karaoke (such as “the Japanese love singing”), showing instead a diversity of karaoke settings and meanings that range from salarymen's smoky bars to the karaoke boxes (rooms rented by the hour) of a younger generation.

Part 3, “The Female Domain,” opens with one of the book’s most provocative chapters. Susan Napier describes four faces of Japanese shôjo, young girls who emerged as leading symbols of Japan’s 1990s consumerism. These faces derive from anime (animated film) heroines who fly, suck blood, have psychic powers, and battle all manner of evil. They offer "intriguing alternatives to Western fantasy females, suggesting . . . that empowerment and femininity come in many forms" (p. 106). Keiko Tanaka analyzes the language used in six women's consumer magazines. In the endless rankings and "blunt and hectoring" (p. 117) tone of the feature articles–"You need two kinds of shoes" (p. 119)–she hears echoes of authoritarian school culture. Paul A. S. Harvey shows how public television's morning dramas, such as “Oshin and Nonchan no yume,” are "a revealing instance of the contradictory ideologies that go into making modern Japan" (p. 133). He argues, for example, that while the shows often portray conservative notions, such as the idea that the heroine is expected to marry and rear children, the effect is to legitimize other, more progressive, elements, such as a woman achieving her dream of becoming the editor-in-chief of a Tokyo magazine.

In part 4, “Shifting Boundaries,” authors show how the borders of popular culture constantly change. Haldár Stefánsson argues that women are increasingly viewed in the popular press as threatening outsiders. His case study is the sensational media coverage of actress-model Miyazawa Rie’s engagement to sumo powerhouse Takanohana and Owada Masako’s engagement to Naruhito, future emperor of Japan. Nagashima Nobuhiro discusses how female fans of a Japanese thoroughbred transformed the image of horse racing. A stallion named Oguricap became the darling of women of all ages--thanks to underdog victories and a handsome jockey. In a witty and perceptive piece, Jonathan Watts argues that Japan's professional soccer association–the J. League–is best understood in terms of a marketing strategy expressed through the slogan shinhatsubai ("New Improved, Now on Sale") (p. 183). Among the contributors, he takes the most sustained look at the production of popular culture.

Taken together, do the authors in this volume demonstrate the existence of consumer nationalism? There are moments when it seems that an ethnic and nationalist fervor is produced, particularly in relation to sumo, the future empress, and even the Japanese horse battling outsiders. But in most chapters, the authors depict worlds that seem separated and adrift among exclusive segments of the population. Readers end up with a picture of Japan that is fragmented but not lonely, where people suffer from anomie but are satisfied customers.

Contributors usefully emphasize the symbolic unpacking of popular culture, often supplementing their analyses with accounts of important historical contexts. Yet this also points to the need for more work. The distinctive power of anthropology arises in part from fieldwork in key social spaces where popular culture is produced and consumed. The authors here give a good sense of what makes these worlds popular. A more sustained examination of specific consumers and producers would provide readers a clearer sense of how and why popular culture plays such a significant role in society. The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture offers a captivating range of case studies and contributes significantly to a growing body of work in popular culture. It would be appropriate in undergraduate or graduate classes.