Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture edited by Rebecca Stein and Ted Swedenburg

BOOK REVIEWS

Gerhard AndersUniversity of Zurich

Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation inCentral Africa

Janet Roitman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)

In many parts of the world, the so-called informal economy is thriving and the institu-tions of the nation-state are often unable to exercise control over economic networksthat transgress its boundaries in ever-increasing intensity and frequency. Criminalnetworks are said to be responsible for a considerable portion of this unregulatedand clandestine economy, moving anything from arms to drugs and other contrabandacross national borders. The informalization and criminalization of the economy ap-pear to be particularly conspicuous in sub-Saharan Africa, where the edifices of thedevelopmental state have crumbled under the pressure of economic crisis and auster-ity programs promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Thisdevelopment has been variously described as “criminalization of the state” (Bayartet al. 1999), with the rise of “shadow states” (Reno 2000) and “shadow economies”(Duffield 2001; Nordstrom 2004).

Roitman presents an ethnography of one of these areas, the Chad Basin, the fron-tier region between northern Cameroon, north-eastern Nigeria, Chad and the CentralAfrican Republic. Here lawlessness and the shadow economy are thriving; unem-ployed youth, smugglers, highway robbers, and corrupt soldiers roam the roads andthe “bush,” criss-crossing national boundaries, while striving to escape dire livingconditions in a context of civil war, high unemployment, and economic crisis. Theinformalization of the economy and the prevalence of criminal networks in the ChadBasin do not, however, imply the breakdown of order, as Roitman argues. She takesissue with approaches that conceptualize the informal or unofficial as unregulated andresidual. Instead she discerns the emergence of new modes of regulatory authorityin a field where basic economic concepts have always been unstable and contested.Fiscal Disobedience is unusual because it focuses on fiscal authority and regulationof the economy—government functions that have received only little attention in theliterature. Roitman argues that the expanding informal cross-border economic activ-ity fuels “interpretive battles” and “intense disagreements” over the legitimacy of thestate’s right to raise taxes and control prices. Drawing on Foucault, she construes ba-sic economic concepts such as tax and price as technologies of fiscal regulation.In doing so she tries to avoid familiar binary oppositions such as legal–illegal,formal–informal or official–unofficial, which fail to grasp the complex waysin which the formal and the informal economy are entangled in the ChadBasin.

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 31, Numbers 1, pps. 150–185. ISSN1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C© 2008 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2008.00011.x.

May 2008 Page 151

A case study of a campaign of civil disobedience in northern Cameroon in the early1990s serves as a point of departure for Roitman’s analysis. This campaign, calledOperation des Villes Mortes, aimed to undermine the government’s fiscal base througha general strike, work boycotts and tax evasion. Roitman reads Operation des VillesMortes not as a protest by an emerging civil society movement against the state, butrather as an attempt to redefine what the state is supposed to do and how to do it. Herethnographic evidence suggests that people who participated in this movement didnot object to the collection of taxes per se, but rather to the heavy-handed tactics oftax collectors and the misuse of public funds.

Roitman situates this attempted redefinition of basic economic concepts within thehistorical context of colonial rule, when the French introduced taxes and price-setting policies in northern Cameroon. The introduction of taxes, a single currency,standards of valuation, and the corresponding administration played a crucial role inFrench attempts to gain control over this area and turn it into a profitable colony.These policies depended on acceptance by the colonized rather than on sheer force,the threat of which was never far away. Roitman argues that people were turnedinto “consumers” of French currency by paying taxes, being a taxpayer constitutingtheir political subjectivity. The category of consumer then became a target of fiscalregulation by the state.

The French colonial administration, however, had difficulties in establishing fiscalcontrol of this region where people were highly mobile and contested the symbols ofFrench colonial rule. The French authorities tried to regulate, that is, to “fix,” these“moving targets.” During the first half of the 20th century, the French identified thepopulation flottante as one of the main challenges to their claim to authority in thisregion. This category denoted those straddling the boundary between legality andillegality in the frontier space of the “bush,” including “nomads, migrants, seasonalmigrant workers, bandits, intermediaries of the caravan trade, traders tout court,highway robbers, itinerant salesmen, smugglers, speculators, marauders, refugees,foreigners, and so forth” (p. 137). Roitman traces the idea of this frontier to the timeof the pre-colonial Sokoto Caliphate of the 19th century that derived its wealth to alarge extent from slave raids in areas populated by non-Muslims.

Roitman represents the “bush” as an ambivalent space that constitutes both a sourceof wealth and a threat. During her fieldwork in the 1990s, many young people foundemployment in the “bush economy” and became smugglers, illegal petrol-sellers,and highway robbers—in numerous ways resembling the colonial category of thepopulation flottante. Roitman observes that for many of these people the violentseizure of wealth appears to be a legitimate mode of wealth creation in a contextof growing violence and economic crisis. This undermines long-established localconceptions of “just price,” which is calculated on the basis of a person’s socialstatus in the community and the person’s social obligations towards the partner in thetransaction. The smugglers, bandits, and various categories of state agents, however,are not merely forces of destruction: “Through violence and forced alienation, theyinterrogate the very relations of dependence and indebtedness that found wealth and

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the productive relations of the community,” thus generating “novel instances of truthabout power over wealth” (p. 79).

The expansion of the “bush economy” and a growing social movement demandingpolitical and economic reforms since the 1990s have resulted in the “pluralization ofregulatory authority,” according to Roitman. Alternative nodes of authorities contestthe state’s claim to undivided sovereignty, and subtly transform the state apparatus it-self. Roitman takes issue with approaches that imagine an absolute divide between twoopposites such as informal–formal, official–unofficial and legal–illegal. Instead shedraws attention to the multifarious ways in which the legal and the illegal economiesare connected and constitute one another. She discovered that the smugglers and high-way robbers collude with army officers, wealthy businessmen, local party officials,and traditional leaders who act as godfathers of these criminal operations. Roitmanuses the term “military–commercial nexus” to denote these clandestine networks. Thestate’s entanglement with the shadow economy implies, according to Roitman, that“the state is at the very heart of the proliferation of unregulated economic exchangesas well as the pluralization of regulatory authority” (p. 204).

I find Roitman’s narrative of the emergence of alternative “regulatory authorities”convincing, since it resonates well with anthropological studies that investigate thehidden connections between the legal and the illegal (Heyman 1999; Nuijten andAnders 2007; Taussig 1999). However, a less sympathetic reader might pose thequestion whether the mere involvement of government officials in criminal rack-ets actually constitutes something akin to legitimate fiscal authority. Here Roitmanconflates actions of corrupt government officials with actions ascribed to the stateitself. Even from a radical empiricist perspective according to which the state “doesnot exist in the phenomenal world” (Radcliffe-Browne 1940), it is necessary to dis-tinguish between individual acts of government officials and acts attributed to thestate.

This criticism harks back to a debate that has haunted legal anthropology for along time: the question whether there is something like thieves’ law. Roitman doesnot enter that discussion—probably a wise decision considering the stalemate thatdebate has reached—and instead discusses the idea that the pluralization of authoritycan be described in terms of sovereignty. Here she resists the tendency to inflatethe meaning of the term sovereignty and argues that the authority exercised bythe “commercial–military nexus” co-exists with the state apparatus and, therefore,transforms the latter rather than replaces or competes with it. This conclusion willhardly surprise anyone familiar with issues of legal complexity and the interrelationof plural normative orders. However, Roitman’s focus on fiscal regulation and hercreative use of Foucauldian concepts recommend her book to anthropologists of lawwho are seeking novel approaches to issues that have been described for too long instructural and institutional terms.

The strengths of Fiscal Disobedience are also its major weaknesses. Roitman de-scribes a vast and ill-defined border region where her informants were always on themove, “always in the back of a Toyota pickup truck on some frontier” (p. 204), and sheherself seems to have traveled in a good many pickup trucks mapping the networks

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of the shadow economy and the pluralization of regulatory authority. This, of course,is one of the book’s main strengths—Roitman does not want to give her readers afalse sense of boundedness and continuity—but sometimes I missed the places sheand her interlocutors undoubtedly passed through or stayed in for extended periodsof time. According to her footnotes, most of her fieldwork appears to have beenconducted in northern Cameroon, in and around the town of Maroua, but she doesnot really situate the “interpretive battles” over economic concepts in that or otherplaces—places where smugglers depart and arrive, where businessmen buy and sellcontraband, and where corrupt administrators work and live.

Another point of criticism is the book’s focus on discourse, on concepts and con-ceptions “about and of the economy” (pp. 8–9). While this focus goes great lengthsat transcending binary oppositions, it also blurs distinctions that might matter. Forexample, in chapter 2 Roitman presents the case of the Operation des Villes Mortescampaign of civil disobedience, and in chapter 7 she describes the “military–commercial nexus” that controls the shadow economy in the Chad Basin. She assertsthat both the participants in the Operation des Villes Mortes and the armed gangsthat prowl the roads and tracks of the Chad Basin “interrogate the very relations ofdependence and indebtedness that found wealth and the productive relations of thecommunity” (p. 79). At a very general level this certainly is correct, but her anal-ysis conflates social movements demanding economic and democratic reform withcriminal rackets of corrupt government officials who have an interest in maintainingthe status quo to protect their business interests. Here Roitman misses the chance topush her analysis of the “pluralization of regulatory authority” further and to avoidthe conflation of phenomena that might have similar effects but nevertheless are of adifferent order.

These criticisms do not imply that Fiscal Disobedience is based on poor ethnographicevidence. On the contrary, Roitman clearly draws on very rich and extensive empiricalmaterial. Her theoretical reflections are always grounded in her fieldwork experience,and she admirably integrates observations made during fieldwork with long sectionsof verbatim transcripts of interviews, as well as with letters, speeches of officials, andother documents in the text. The voices she presents are articulate and idiosyncraticcomments on current events in the Chad Basin, and make very good and at timesentertaining reading.

Fiscal Disobedience is a sophisticated and complex ethnographic study of the trans-formation of the state and the rise of unregulated transborder commercial networks ina volatile region. The book’s focus on economic regulation and fiscal authority is wellchosen. Debates about the legitimacy of the state’s claim on part of the private wealthof its citizens and the proper use of public funds are key to understanding the livedrealities of many Africans today. This volume provides a fresh look at theoreticalproblems anthropologists of the state and legal anthropologists have been grapplingwith for some time now and is, therefore, highly recommended to a wider readershipthan just those taking an interest in Africa.


References Cited

Bayart, J.-F., S. Ellis, and B. Hibou, eds.1999 The Criminalization of the State in Africa. Oxford: James Currey

and Indiana University Press.Duffield, M.

2001 Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Develop-ment and Security. London: Zed Books.

Heyman, J. McC., ed.1999 States and Illegal Practices. Oxford: Berg.

Nordstrom, C.2004 Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering

in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress.

Nuijten, M. and G. Anders, eds.2007 Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Per-

spective. Aldershot: Ashgate.Radcliffe-Brown, A.R.

1940 Preface. In African Political Systems. M. Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, eds. Pp. i–xxiii. London: Oxford University Press.

Reno, W.2000 Clandestine Economies, Violence and States in Africa. Journal of

International Affairs 52(2):433–459.Taussig, M.

1999 Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

A. AneeshUniversity of Wisconsin—Milwaukee

Injury: The Politics of Product Design and Safety Law in the United States

Sarah S. Lochlann Jain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

In her astonishingly incisive book, Injury, Sarah Lochlann Jain brushes aside a centuryof jaded debates on what should count as injury for legal compensation. The bookis timely. In 2004, President Bush promised to quell “the explosion of frivolouslawsuits that threaten jobs across America.” Ralph Nader, on the other hand, findsin proposals for tort reform an aggressive corporate drive to duck responsibility fordangerous products. The book defies both sides of the debate. Frivolous lawsuits aresurely not frivolous nor are serious lawsuits too serious about the question of injury inAmerica. In a reversal of received wisdom, Jain demonstrates how human woundingin American society is systemic. “Approximately, 45,000 will die—violently—incar crashes this year,” no matter how avoidable each crash appears later in a courtof law. Many more will turn obese whether or not McDonald’s or KFC is found

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guilty in a “frivolous” class action for causing the injury of obesity. Still more willsuffer from cancers, medications, repetitive stress, and back injuries. The woundingis often written—intended or not—into the product design itself. Airbags may savelives but they may structurally exclude children and women who tend to be shorterthan the average height covered by the design. Jain contributes to the legal studiesliterature through detailed analyses of how inequities—including but not limitedto race, class, and gender—are distributed through product design, and then againthrough injury law. These injuries remain recursively invisible through systems ofcapitalist production, workers’ compensation, tort laws, and the very constitution ofcategories such as race and gender.

Based in original and detailed ethnographic and archival research, Injury questionsthe framing of injury in terms of right and wrong where blame can be assignedas a matter of fact, a deeply American approach widely represented in films likeErin Brockovich or A Class Action. For her study Jain also avoids easy and highlyvisible accidents. Instead, she selects for scrutiny three difficult cases of cumulative,invisible, and systemic wounding. While two cases—those of the short-handled hoeand keyboard—tell the story of production in farm and service work, the final study ofmentholated cigarettes delves into consumption. The three cases, skillfully explained,are devoid of dramatic or sudden turns of events, showing how these objects woundedover time when used as intended.

In 1975 an unsuspected actor, weighing merely three to four pounds at 10 to 14inches, was found guilty of hurting farm workers of California: a dangerous, arm-of-the-devil, El Cortito or the short-handled hoe. It was regularly used for thinninglettuce, celery, and beet starts. The short-handled hoe, a study found, caused a hostof health problems in 87 percent of respondents: crippling back injuries, nose bleeds,kidney malfunction, headaches, arthritis, wrist swelling, and exhaustion. But thediscovery of this danger was not sudden or final. The hoe was outlawed in 1975 notbecause of the court’s inherent tendency to justice; it was banned because of changesin the social and political climate in which any legal regime is always embedded.Attorneys with the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) admitted to the authorthat “without Jerry Brown’s election and his replacement of key political figures, theshort hoe would still be in use” (p. 83). Indeed, the hoe was not considered inherentlydangerous until the CRLA appealed the case to the California Supreme Court. Manywould argue the hoe was eventually banned and justice restored. But the author goeson to show how the ban, even in its tremendous justice to the farm worker, alsosidestepped a host of other troubling issues. By isolating the hoe, the law made itpossible not to deal with stoop labor in general, or racial injustice against Mexicanworkers of which the hoe was an important part.

The author selects for her second case once again a seemingly innocuous, widelyused, everyday product: the keyboard. In the 1980s injuries caused by the keyboardbecame an “epidemic” followed by a litigation wave of the 1990s. Repetitive straininjuries (RSIs) or computer-induced cumulative trauma disorders (CTDs) reachednearly “a million cases per year by 1995,” with an average of $29,000 spent inworker compensation and health care costs. In several hundred lawsuits, plaintiffsclaimed that keyboards were the cause of severely disabling hand and wrist injuries.


Of the few cases that went to trial, all were lost by the plaintiffs, despite the fact thatthe media had mainstreamed a variety of soft tissue injuries. In Howard v. DigitalEquipment Corporation, the court found that the problem was the repetitive use ofthe product, not the product itself. Manufacturers did not have a duty to warn the userof a danger not only obvious to the user, but also easily resolved by taking breaksor adjusting office equipment. Their lawyer claimed, “These are keyboards we’retalking about, not asbestos, not lead.”

Jain examines keyboard designs to argue that the issue was more complex. Many ofthe keyboards in question required the force to depress keys far in excess of whatwas required by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). One ergonomicsexpert argued, “The poor design of the keys translated into 31,658 to 37,989 poundsof added force per day, transmitted through the fingertips, fingers, hands, and arms”(p. 91). The dangers of force and inadequate tactile feedback were never obviousto the user, the author argues, but were known to the manufacturers since the earlydays of the typewriter. The book takes the reader on the keyboard’s fascinatinggenealogical journey, covering such diverse issues as the advent of the typewriter, theheterosexualization of the office, the development of alternative keyboard designs,and the defeat of superior designs against minor retraining costs.

On the consumption side, the book offers a rich analysis of the legal framing ofcigarettes, which also “injure when used as intended.” One lawsuit in particularwas interesting. Although dismissed by the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2001, thisinjury claim was brought by Reverend Jesse Brown as a civil rights suit on behalfof black smokers, a major departure from product liability approaches to legal ret-ribution for dangerous products. The complaint highlighted discrimination throughniche marketing: “Defendants have for many years targeted African Americans andtheir communities with specific advertising to lure them into using mentholated to-bacco products,” resulting in “staggering loss of life, premature disability, disease,illness, and economic loss” (p. 125). Mentholated cigarettes contained enhanceddangers: benzopyrene, higher nicotine and tar levels, and menthol, which encour-aged deeper and longer inhalation. Ninety percent of African American youth whosmoked, smoked menthols. Jain offers a remarkable account of not only racism andconsumption but also the larger power dynamics of consumer culture that the legalsystem will always fail to notice: corporate accountability to stockholders, requiringthe presence and production of smokers; the government’s investments in economicgrowth, allowing dangerous products to exist and making “exceptions” for them; andconsumers’ choices in contexts beyond their ken.

In a way, the book highlights how product liability laws miraculously transformstructural injury into individual injury. Tort law, in its very ability to restore justiceto the injured, blinds us to larger systemic injustice. As the law awards punitive andcompensatory damages after each incident of injury, it also helps to keep the mythof injury as “exception.” First, it posits consumers as rational actors who by natureare capable of considering carefully the pros and cons of their “free choice.” Second,the individualized frame of litigation awards or denies compensation by excludingfactors that fall outside the contract between two individuals—consumer (or a classof consumers) and corporation as a fictive individual. This legal framing bypasses

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structural questions about both injury and remedy. Regarding injury, courts may denyclaims for compensation by isolating the device from its larger network: the keyboardfrom requirements of repetitive office work, or the hoe from the repetitive stoop labor.This permits a familiar verdict: the device was not inherently dangerous. Regardingremedy, courts may award compensation to an individual, bypassing the problemof the absence of legislation and universal health care that may suggest collectiveremedies.

Injury is perhaps the most important anthropological work on law and human wound-ing. Integrating larger questions of consumption, work, productivity, progress, andpolitics, the analysis moves on several levels at once. The book changes the face ofdebate in precisely the direction tort law blinds us. I recommend the book to everyone:lawyers, academics and students. Injury will suit both graduate and undergraduatecourses. The three cases discussed are highly accessible for the undergraduate stu-dent, while chapters on injury, risk, and culture will encourage the graduate studentto think theoretically about similar issues.

Amanda BakaleNew York University

Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States

Sheila Jasanoff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)

Locating science in the interaction of society and the state, Sheila Jasanoff, in herbook Designs on Nature, explores developments in genetic engineering and theresulting regulatory policies in the United States and Europe. Jasanoff deftly setsup an interesting query: given these purportedly similar Western societies, situatedin an increasingly globalized marketplace with the same set of biotechnology toolsand methods, why should their political reactions be so diverse? Jasanoff treatsbiotechnology as a part of the self-conscious project of nation-building in the UnitedStates, United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Union, considering science andpolitics as mutually constitutive disciplines. Three controlling narratives provide thecontextual framework of how genetic engineering is understood in these nationalepistemological systems. First, biotechnology is a process that studies and intervenesin nature. Second, genetic engineering is a source of products that benefit society.Finally, state-sponsored science carries implications for social life and citizenship. Byengaging in multi-sited ethnography, Jasanoff reveals these three narratives at work inframing the policy approaches in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germanywith respect to the ethical, legal, and social ramifications of several fields withinbiotechnology—including genetically modified agricultural products, reproductivetechnologies, and embryonic stem cell research.

Jasanoff demonstrates the correlation between changing attitudes toward science andthe political circumstances of the day, and is critical of the influence of the short-termpolitical moods. For example, the social construction of the embryo through legal and


legislative discourses allowed state actors to affect social change through reproductiveresearch policies. The United Kingdom and Germany were quick to recognize thatregulatory guidelines would be necessary to set boundaries on applications of em-bryonic stem cell research. Public funding of stem cell research in the United Stateswas conducive to scientific progress because this contentious issue was situated in asociety that desires both government monitoring and a green light for research.

Understanding of the interaction between science, politics, and civil society relies inpart on Jasanoff’s analysis of the various roles that the scientific community plays inaffecting policy. In the United States for instance, given the prevalence of litigation,low regulatory thresholds serve to protect science and industry in the adversarialsystem. Europeans display a great trust in expertise when formulating public policy,resulting in regulatory systems insulated from public scrutiny. Legislation on stem cellresearch exemplified the United Kingdom’s informal delegation of decision-makingto scientific experts, as the legislation glossed over inconsistencies in defining theorigins of human life for the purposes of research and for those of abortion.

In various political contexts, scientific experts emerge as a social type, one thatis determined by qualifications and experience, by their evaluation by peers. Thepolitical and legal fields have left intact and incorporated into their own evaluationsthe practice of peer review to determine the merits of scientific practice. Jasanoffpoints out that these applications tend to reify peer review as an apolitical process;peer review is invoked to display science as a unified discourse insulated fromquestions of value and politics. Jasanoff identifies an explicit assumption in theUnited States that science functions objectively within a larger subjective politicalcontext. Casting science as apolitical, in what Jasanoff characterizes as a distinctlyAmerican maneuver, is itself a politically charged action. European notions of peerreview, particularly regarding safety and risk calculation, does not limit review tothose embedded in the scientific profession. The European style of review resemblesinterdisciplinary knowledge production, with a broad set of political stakeholdersto discuss the social ramifications of biotechnology research and development. TheEuropean focus on social impact and welfare, contrasted with the individual riskassessment and market driven autonomy that characterizes American approaches toscience policy, is used to explain how such transatlantic distinctions arose.

Knowledge formation is a central theme of Designs on Nature, and the book makes itclear that science and government continue to play a large role in influencing publicknowledge. Government and science can manipulate which information is sharedwith the public, and the manner in which it is presented. Moments of policy shifts arethemselves products of long-standing political traditions in each country, as politicalactors interpret biological facts within the constraints of their democratic institutions,and in culturally specific ways (see also Richardt 2003). Science is co-opted into thepolitical arena because its questions are categorized as problems of a communal na-ture. Citizens presumably want their nation’s science policy to reflect their communalvalues, no less when the question at hand is a matter of bioethics. Though generallysubservient to political forces, bioethics emerged in all three national contexts as aninterdisciplinary bridge linking science, state, and civil society (p. 201). Bioethics is

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described as a democratizing discourse, whereby participants in civil society use therubric of bioethical analysis to create deliberative spaces outside of the state. Becausebioethical questions are highly context dependent, an ethnographic approach caneffectively enquire into how ethical choices are structures in medical and scientificdomains (Dzur and Levin 2004:348). Jasanoff’s book provides such a study of howscientific developments spark debates about ethics and values.

Jasanoff turns her analysis to the extent to which private actors in civil society areengaged in this discourse. In the absence of a grandiose achievement (like a moonlanding) or the perception of imminent necessity (like national security) to galvanizepopular support, the overall acceptance of biotechnology needs to be explained (p.249). It is in this analytical setting that the tools of anthropology might best be de-ployed to explain the relationship between science and political communities. Statesand institutions can wield the power of biological knowledge to get citizens to accept,in a Foucauldian sense, certain categories and qualities that impinge upon themselves,allowing the government to govern through science. For example, when industriesthat employ biotechnology need to enter markets, some government regulation servesto facilitate that entry by creating a trusting audience for the products. By making thepublic comfortable with genetically modified products, without raising the thresh-old of market entry, government oversight can actually encourage people to chooseriskier options.

Public support for large-scale biotechnology developments is necessary for their po-litical and financial success. This support depends on factors of political culture, suchas faith in experts, trust in the scientific method, and confidence in the regulatory state.Americans are less likely than Europeans to be aware of their consumption of genet-ically modified food; this ignorance can account, at least partially, for the differencein public attitudes toward its production and distribution (see Murcott 2001). LikeMurcott, however, Jasanoff problematizes the assumption that mere awareness ofscientific developments will demystify and improve the policy discourse; knowledgedeficit is an inadequate explanatory device.

Jasanoff grounds the concept of civic epistemology in categorical modes—such asconsensus-seeking, contentious, and communitarian—that are treated as ideal typesthat are expressed to different degrees and in different combinations in national con-texts. The book’s comparative approach addresses why national differences occur.While Jasanoff acknowledges that differences are significant specifically because onewould expect similarities to result from globalization, it is divergence and not conver-gence that is the focus of the book. Insofar as its goal is to illuminate political cultureas both resilient and constructed, Designs on Nature is an important contribution tothe sociological analysis of the interaction of science with public life.

References Cited

Dzur, Albert W. and Daniel Levin2004 The “Nation’s Conscience:” Assessing Bioethics Commissions as

Public Forums. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14(4):333–360.


Murcott, Anne2001 Public Beliefs about GM Foods: More on the Makings of a Con-

sidered Sociology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 15(1):9–19.Richardt, Nicole

2003 A Comparative Analysis of the Embryological Research Debate inGreat Britain and Germany. Social Politics: International Studies inGender, State and Society 10(1):86–128.

Jane FergusonCornell University

Pachangas: Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics and TransnationalMarketing

Margaret E. Dorsey (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006)

In her book, Pachangas: Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics and Transnational Mar-keting, Margaret E. Dorsey examines the multiple ways in which political partiesand corporations mobilize the pachanga (a broad signifier for an event, or party,featuring food and music) to further their own interests within South Texas com-munities in Hidalgo County. Dorsey conducted ethnographic fieldwork in HidalgoCounty by attending over hundred of these events, which included those sponsoredby political parties and corporations alike. Key to her argument is an explanation ofthe various methods by which organizers tap into the structure, staging, and perhapsmost importantly, music associated with these events. Dorsey’s work offers a detailedand important on-the-ground explanation as to how voting publics are mobilizedthough the invocation of themes and signifiers pointing to a notion of the traditionalpachanga. She also interrogates the ways in which the event has been modified toserve contemporary political and corporate needs.

Dorsey’s work begs us to question this concept of a “local” South Texas. She rightlyquestions the claim to a bounded “South Texas” community espoused by the orga-nizers of the Anheuser-Busch-sponsored “Fiesta Extravaganza.” At the same time,she argues that it is South Texans who have “rearticulated the political pachanga’smeaning and use from a private, exclusively male event in the country to a public,mixed-gender spectacle” (p. 11), so evidently there is a complex form of place-makingthat happens as part of the marketing and staging of these events.

The risk and potential loss involved in the staging of a pachanga could be lookedat as potlatch, which, according to Bataille, would be a means of circulating wealth(Botting 1997:202); the investment (destruction) of value inherent in the pachanga is anecessary moment which preserves and bolsters the circulation of the political-hence-economic power of its producers. Furthermore, Dorsey asserts that “risk-bearingrelationships that are important in facilitating the movement of global capital aregrounded in and even reliant on these most parochial-seeming relationships” (p. 72).

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Conversely, one could view this as a form of co-optation, in which the facade of thoseseemingly parochial relationships is actually being used to further broader capitalistinterests.

The book also examines the idea of the “traditional” pachanga, which, as Dorseyargues, was once a private event featuring music, and was attended by men only. Isthere a traceable genealogy of the pachanga? The flexibility of the word pachangaitself within contemporary Latin American contexts suggests that the notion of thepolitical pachanga as a male event might represent a specific moment in one ofthe many manifestations of pachanga. If contemporary urban Mexican youth con-sider going out to bars and clubs as a form of pachanga, then what process leadsto re-assertion of the notion of a “traditional” pachanga? What, if any, form ofpachanga would be juxtaposed with the traditional form? I would suggest that per-haps this ideology of the South Texan traditional pachanga says more about localcontrasts and about current ways of mobilizing these former notions than is sug-gested by allusions to the “actual” traditional pachanga in any discrete form. In amigrant community, whose tradition are they talking about, anyhow? However, it isnot so important after all to specify precisely whose tradition it might be because,as Dorsey argues, two of the modern political pachangas failed, partially becausethey neglected to invoke the traditional pachanga (p. 123). Perhaps it is the notionof the traditional pachanga, then, that is discursively real, more than any actual“tradition.”

Dorsey points out that popular academic notions regarding voting practices tend tocharacterize these political decisions as being made by autonomous actors (p. 184).However her conclusion suggests that this is not true at all. Instead, she suggests thatthrough a complex process of “latching” to “catchy” music, among other constituentelements, people are able to act—perhaps Durkheim might have argued—in the spiritof collective effervescence. In this section, it would be useful to see the forms andgenres of music, the corrido in particular, explained in greater detail—its musicalstructure, instrumentation, and associated signification amongst listening (and non-listening) members of Dorsey’s ethnographic subjects.

Another track that I would like to have seen pursued further is the suggestion thatthe event, the pachanga, is able to “produce democratic publics” (p. 2). One won-ders whether this “democratic” notion is one of ideological equality, which could beargued to be an instrument of bourgeois rule used to maintain the idea that repre-sentative democracy represents the “will” of the majority. This pervasive idea of theautonomous voting decision in representative democracy has long been questionedby Marxist political theorists. Some of what Dorsey is suggesting in her analysisof the success of the pachangas is that they are powerful instruments for garneringpolitical support—for producing her “democratic publics.” But if those publics arevoting against their very class interests, it might be instructive to ask how the notionof the traditional pachanga could serve as a conservative strategy for ruling elites, ifnot corporations.


Amidst much speculation as to how and why people vote the way they do, or consumewhat they do, Dorsey’s work presents an important contribution that helps clarify theseopaque and seemingly arbitrary practices.

References Cited

Botting, Fred, and Scott Wilson, eds.1997 The Bataille Reader. London: Blackwell.

Dorsey, Margaret E.2006 Pachangas: Borderlands Music, US Politics, and Transnational

Marketing. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Carrie Anne FurmanUniversity of California—Riverside

Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal ComplexityDik Roth Rutgerd Boelens, and Margreet Zwarteveen eds. (New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press, 2005)

Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal Complexity, is an edited volumededicated to addressing the often obscure sociopolitical and legal dimensions of wa-ter. Due to the growing scarcity of water, the past few decades have seen an increasein both theoretical and applied pursuits charged with finding a new path in watermanagement. Until recently, this call to protect one of our most cherished naturalresources has been led on the one hand by scientists and environmentalists, and on theother hand by politicians and economists. Though each specialty represents a diver-gent agenda, their solutions are often distilled down to a universal prescription thatfavors efficiency and ignores the specific needs of indigenous and other marginalizedpeoples. Only very recently has the subject of the social nature of water entered intoacademic discourse and impacted the implementation of irrigation management anddesign (e.g., Boelens and Davila 1998; Boelens and Hoogendam 2002).

Appeals for more sustainable irrigation systems partially designed and managed bythe very groups of people who are actively using the water have proven to be a success-ful alternative. Heading the charge to implement more socially and cultural sensitivewater distribution systems are indigenous and marginalized groups supported bythe research and writings of anthropologists and sociologists. The authors of LiquidRelations continue this important dialogue and extend it into new arenas by exploringthe legal aspects of irrigation water as it pertains to underrepresented groups. For thereader interested in one particular locale, each chapter provides invaluable historicalinformation, discusses the diverse legal frameworks at play, and examines the waysin which both interact with and are shaped by sociopolitical processes. The strengthof this book arises, however, when read in its entirety, as each chapter provides thereader with a slightly different perspective of water governance and the importanceof paying attention to legal pluralism.

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Liquid Relations begins with an introduction that sets the tone for the chapters thatfollow. The editors Dik Roth, Rutgerd Boelens, and Margreet Zwarteveen explain theimportance of moving away from “tool-box” or “blueprint” style irrigation reformsthat have become hegemonic (1). Irrigation reform should instead reflect the socialnature of water, as it is a resource used to meet a wide variety of social ends thatinclude direct consumption, ritual and religious practices, and industrial growth.They argue against a strict economic or scientific treatment of water issues thatignores the delicate sociopolitical interactions occurring between the different levelsof society by focusing on legal pluralism. Since state-based or top-down controlof water systems have become the leading solution for solving the water scarcitydilemma, it is imperative for the research that informs these applied projects toanalyze how these laws are expressed at the local level, transformed to meet theneeds of daily life, and used to favor one group over another.

The following chapters develop different aspects of this theme and give the readercomprehensive case studies from Latin America, Asia, the United States, and Africa.Chapters 2 through 8 focus on the theoretical discussion of water rights and legalpluralism. These studies take the reader through different examples of state-basedor other forms of top-down projects that follow a “blueprint” style of irrigationmanagement that distills the legal complexity of water down to one set of prescribedprinciples. Though the message is similar, each case illustrates the diverse wayin which indigenous and marginalized groups negotiate these structures. Themesinclude ethnicity-based divisions of water rights in the United States, Indonesia, andthe Andes (chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7), class divisions in Nepal and India (chapters 6 and8), and gender inequalities in Nepal (chapter 2).

Of specific note for future studies on irrigation systems and legal pluralism arethe issues raised in chapter 2 by Pranita Bhushan Udas and Margreet Zwarteveen.This chapter calls attention to the issue of gender inequalities, ignored not only bytechnocrats, policy makers, and researches but also by the water users themselves.Programs that contextualize local political struggles, equity, and the participationof women are going to become even more important as men migrate away fromthe family farm in search of jobs. Women in these cases are left to manage theagricultural base, interacting directly with irrigation councils or water technicians, andcontributing to work parties. Because top-down prescriptions and policies designed toequalize gender differences often fail, these authors call for real and lasting changes,including programs to further the education for women and girls “so that womenthemselves actively demand for rights and voice in water decision making” (p. 42).

Chapters 9 through 11 extend the theoretical discussions of the first chapters andemploy an applied component to this volume. Chapters 9 and 10 focus on SouthAfrica and Southeast Asia respectively. The authors give the reader some practicalguides when dealing with legal pluralism in irrigation, and argue for developing morebottom-up approaches to water rights. Chapter 11 extends this theme and discussesthe importance of legal pluralism in intersectoral water transfers from agriculturaluse to nonagricultural use. By highlighting the importance of acknowledging legalpluralism in this debate, these authors address case studies from around the world.


In the final chapter, the editors highlight the importance of acknowledging the diver-sity of water rights so as to avoid the over simplification of policy. What is more,the editors remind the reader to be modest when designing laws and policy. As seenin many of the case studies discussed above, legal changes alone cannot undo yearsof inequalities and cultural differences. The reader of Liquid Relations comes awaywith both a healthy respect for the damage ill-placed laws can produce, and an appre-ciation for the diverse ways in which individuals and groups modify and adjust lawsand policy to meet their own specific needs. The construction of water rights is notjust the act of distributing water to the locations where it is needed the most. Water,and especially irrigation water, is highly politicized.

As stated in the concluding chapter, the goal for “this book was to bridge the feltgap between the analysis of water rights and the assumptions and practices of inter-vention” (p. 254). Critique and theorizing is an important first step in any process ofchange and reform, yet often these ideas fall away or become misused when practicedoes not feature predominantly in the literature. Though they did an excellent job infulfilling their goal, more work needs to be done. Hopefully, Liquid Relations willinspire further debate, discussion, and applied research into this important topic.

References Cited

Boelens, Rutgerd, and Gloria Davila1998 Searching for Equity: Conceptions of Justice and Equity in Peas-

ant Irrigation. The Netherlands: Van Gorcum.Boelens, Rutgerd, and Paul Hoogendam, eds.

2002 Water Rights and Empowerment. The Netherlands: Van Gorcum.

Tobias KellyUniversity of Edinburgh

Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular CultureRebecca Stein and Ted Swedenburg, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2005)

Anybody who tries to write about Israel–Palestine in a nuanced manner is facedwith at least two major problems. First, there is a tendency to reduce the regionto the rigid binarisms of Israeli–Palestinian and Jew–Arab. Whilst such oppositionsare undeniably important, they can also obscure the complexity of social, cultural,and political life, and rather than be taken for granted they need to be explained ascontingent categories. Second, there is a parallel tendency to focus on the spectacularacts of violence that dominate the headlines. It would of course be foolish to denythat the region is marked by violence, but a focus on the blood and the guts not onlyignores the many other ways through which people relate to one another and give

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meaning to their lives, but also abstracts violence away from the wider context withinwhich it emerges. Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture is a fascinatingand valuable attempt to move beyond the cliches, binarisms, and gore of much thatis written about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, by focusing on the dynamic forms ofpopular culture that are produced in and about the region. In doing so the editors, TedSwedenburg and Rebecca Stein, have brought together a series of essays that rangefrom the first half of the 20th century to the present day. The book does not ignorethe wider politics of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but is an attempt to look at itsideways on, through a focus on popular culture.

The chapters are written by people with a background in anthropology, sociology,literature, politics, and history. In addition to general historical overviews (Pappe),individual chapters deal with newspapers and popular music in Mandate Palestine(Levine, Tamari); modern Palestinian and Israeli cinema (Alexander, Bardenstein);refugees and the Internet (Khalili); popular Arabic songs about Palestine (Masad,Colla); Jewish–Arab musical fusions in Algeria, France, and Israel (Swedenburg,Horowitz); the contemporary Israeli press (Stein); comic books (Layoun); and evan-gelical American fiction (McAlister). Popular culture is understood in a broad manner,to encompass both the concerns of elites, and the mass culture of what is often knowneuphemistically as the “Arab street.” Although this may seem a wider and disparatesubject matter, this in many ways is the greatest strength of the collection. Much thatis written about the region is based on assertion and conjecture rather than on detailedanalysis of life as it is lived on the ground. A collection that is so rich in its empiricaldetails and offers some wonderful case studies is therefore to be welcomed.

The editors claim in their introduction that their aim is to “destabilize the fiction ofthe Arab–Jew divide.” The volume seeks to “undermine the Zionist narrative” andbe critical of Palestinian nationalism, while recognizing the wider inequalities thatstructure the conflict. In the context of the essays collected here, this not only meanslooking at the shared cultural life of the region, but also exploring how these culturalforms take shape in a context of regional and international political divisions, thatstretch well beyond the confines of Israel–Palestine. Contributors describe how anIsraeli Jew of Moroccan descent sings Turkish and Egyptian melodies to Palestinianaudiences (Horowitz), how under the British Mandate Palestinian Christians playedAndalusian music with Jewish musicians at Muslim weddings (Tamari), and howArabs play Jewish rabbis or army officers in modern Israeli cinema (Bardenstein).Chapter after chapter shows the hybridity and dynamism of the cultural life of theregion. Nostalgia for a more culturally fluid time runs through many of the chapters,seen by some as ending with the creation of the state of Israel, and by others withthe second intifada. There is therefore a recognition that the very divides that thiscollections seeks to undermine reappear in the lives of the people in the region.

In large measure the recognition of divisions amongst the flows of cultural life isundertaken by a focus on the conditions of production and distribution of music,films, and newspapers—that is always rooted in the particular political economy ofthe region. Alexander, for example, argues that in the context of a stagnant Palestinianeconomy and the absence of a Palestinian state, Palestinian film makers are often


trained and funded in Europe, and it easier to see a Palestinian film in a provincialEuropean city than in Nablus or Hebron, raising important questions about what itmight mean to talk about Palestinian cinema at all. A focus on the conditions ofcultural production allows the authors to keep an eye on the broader inequalitieswithin which cultural exchanges take place, and thereby not fall into the trap ofromanticizing the shared experiences that such exchanges might seem to promise.

As such, a central, perhaps irresolvable, tension therefore runs through the heart of thebook. Flow, exchange and cross-fertilization, exist alongside separation, inequality,and division. The collected authors have not attempted to gloss over this tension, buthave treated it as the focus of the volume. How can we account for, the editors ask intheir introduction, the simultaneous popularity among Israeli audiences of Jewish andArab rap music, and the increasing calls for separation from Palestinian populationsfrom section of the Israeli public? As Swedenburg asks in his own chapter, shouldwe read such cross fertilization of cultural tastes as an implicit critique of nationalistideologies, as political apathy, or merely an appreciation of good music? However,because of the very focus on production and distribution that is one of this volume’sstrongest points, we are largely unable to answer these questions. With a few notableexceptions, there is very little extended analysis of the conditions of consumption. Wedo not know how Israelis understand the Turkish melodies they listen to, or Egyptiansthe anti-Israeli pop songs on their radios. Such questions need to be answered if weare to put the politics back into our analysis of popular culture.

Marcy Brink-DananBrown University

Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity onthe Greek-Albanian Border

Sarah F. Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)

Sarah Green takes up the issue of multiple and shifting identities at the border in“Notes from the Balkans.” This theory-driven account of people living on the Greek-Albanian border (Epirus or, more specifically, Pogoni) takes the form of chaptersorganized around concepts, such as “margins,” “travel,” “movement” “fractality” and“embodiment.” Her interest in using marginality as a source of creative inspiration orescape from the “normative” leads her to choose the Pogoni region of Epirus as herfieldsite, which she considers the “margins of the margins” (2005:6). Contests overthis particular border, through the drawing of maps and narration, can be traced fromthe Cold War to the present and involve not only Greeks and Albanians but otherpolitical actors as well. However, according to Green, this area’s marginality is notablefor its lack of distinction, its ordinariness and its ambiguous state of demographicdecline. Green looks to the ordinary to find an escape from the normative; thus beginsher ethnography of the Greek-Albanian border

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She begins the book by building on a well-established narrative trope of Greece asEurope’s margin (cf. Herzfeld (1987, 1997), Seremetakis (1991, 1996) and Papatax-iarchis (1999). Green then explicitly dovetails the idea of marginality into popularpostmodern theories of identity (specifically the degradation of modernist intellectualand geographic borders). Green’s book reopens a discussion about the relationshipbetween theory and ethnography. I wonder: are we looking for postmodern sub-jects to go with popular theories or are we using postmodern theory to understandthe people with whom we work? For example, Green’s describes how Kasidiarispeoples’ notions of place evoked to her Gupta and Ferguson’s theoretical discourseof interconnectedness in the global/local (2005:89). Do people in the Balkans de-mand a better understanding of shifting identities and multiplicity? Do those of usinterested in pursuing these ideas seek people who are “good to think with” (inLevi-Strauss’ terms)? Although she puts postmodern thinkers’ ideas to good use, attimes, the thoughts of others overwhelm her own astute interpretations. As such, herethnographic descriptions sometimes come too late.

If the names of famous anthropologists sometimes upstage those of Epirots, thisphenomenon may be partially related to the very marginality of the anthropologicalsubject about whom Green has chosen to write. What is most striking about thecharacters in this book is Green’s assertion that what makes their story worth tellingis their ordinariness as “non-specific” Greeks (Greki). This take on a “plain” identityadds a new dimension to discussions of marginality. Unlike many subjects of queerstudies, minority studies, etc., whose difference from others sets them apart, Green’ssubjects are those unmarked Greeks whose lack of distinctiveness or ambiguousaffiliation is what makes them marginal in the first place (see also Tsing 1993).

Like marginality, the travel trope has become an increasingly necessary way of look-ing at population movement. In Epirus, Green observes pastoralists, traders, workers,families and sheep traversing the ambiguous border between Greece and Albania;Epirots inhabit different homes as the seasons fluctuate. Given the range of reasonspeople go from one place to another, the general idea of “travel” well-describesmovement in which some things change while others stay the same. Green offersan intriguing example of entire towns relocating up and down mountains: in everysense, their new surroundings should feel foreign (2005:57). Nonetheless, the com-munity remains more or less demographically (if not structurally) constant, despitetheir different contexts. Green argues that, unlike much anthropological literaturewhich emphasizes movement as a new phenomenon (and therefore a cause of psy-chic or social strain on migrants), one must understand that Epirots take movementfor granted.

As anthropology shifts away from an emphasis on area studies of bounded cultures,movement (migration, repatriation, etc.) remains a central concern. Two visions ofan approach to area studies are implicit in Green’s title. On one hand, by calling thiswork “Notes from the Balkans,” Green deemphasizes the role of the nation-state inthe formation of identity. At the same time, her subtitle returns us to the role of thestate in drawing lines through geologically continuous/uniform terrain. Movementacross borders in Epirus is complicated by the fact that those borders can be porous,


inconstant, open or closed (depending on the drawing of maps and the changingof political regimes). She pays careful attention to the way her informants narratemovement across the border, with special emphasis on the fact that the once relativelyopen Greek-Albanian border was sealed for much of the latter half of the 20th century.After the border was reopened (in the 1990s), reunions between estranged relatives oneither side produced unexpected clashes and tensions. A shared history mapped ontodecades of living under different regimes made loved ones simultaneously familiarand strange (2005:62).

Readers might consider “The Balkan Fractal” to be the core of the book. In thischapter, Green partners with the notion of fractals to dance gracefully through layersof nested Balkan identities (cf. especially Irvine and Gal 2000). Given the region’schanging borders and historical inheritance of multiple political and ethnic structures(the Ottoman Empire, the division of the Balkan region into autonomous nation-states,etc.), this model works particularly well to describe her subjects, those inhabitantsof the Greek-Albanian border whose own understanding of the region is drawn froma notion of changing political frameworks. Using fractals to invoke similarity evenin changing circumstances, Green borrows Strathern’s notion of “not quite replica-tion” (1992). However, Green’s analysis emphasizes that looking at phenomena withtheories of fractality in mind leaves us short, unless we incorporate the issue of“scale” into our thinking. Depending on the scales one uses to measure and classifypeoples, their difference and sameness will appear to refract indefinitely. The kalei-doscope of identity described in the Balkans appears as conflict when one attemptsto apply statistical ways of thinking to fractal situations. The drawing of maps, takingof censuses, and other forms of counting insist that things remain the same (in theEuclidean mindset of the measurable, quantifiable universe), rather than expressinga similarity compatible with change. Different ways of counting and measuring peo-ple, land, animals or other subjects/objects demand distinct classifications which arethus unable to account for postmodern subjects (marginal figures, travelers or familymembers with different passports) (2005:163).

Green pursues the issue of counting by examining the embodied sites of statisticaland fractal thought: numbers and names of people and places (cf. Kertzer and Arel2002). She reckons with statistical data as a participant in a European Union projectaimed at the classification of land usage. Green’s project is partially funded by amultinational group researching land degradation and she is “in Epirus to investigatepeople’s changing relationship with their landscape ( . . . )” (2005:21). Her ethnogra-phy emphasizes Epirots’ relationship to the ground, the dirt and soil of a place, asa symbol of home, of transience or of negotiation, rather than as a stable politicalboundary, like a line on a map. In this case, Green literally maps out a notion of“shifting” not only in geopolitical terms but also in physical changes in the earth’ssurface. The analogy bears special attention, as Green crafts her ethnography bypairing images of soil erosion with narratives of life in a “politically tectonic zone”(2005:96).

She similarly analyzes unstable numbers in town censuses and public records. Oneof the most memorable descriptions of fractal thought is her observation that the

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literal margins of census books are littered with pencil notes, changes and com-ments: evidence of a linear system crying out for a wider perspective. Indeed, inwriting this review, I wasn’t sure what to call the subjects of the ethnography: Al-banians . . . Epirots . . . Greeks . . . Europeans? Different states and empires (at varioushistorical junctures) have considered these subjects their own according to multipleand changing political logics. Green shows that, in Eprius (as elsewhere), meaningchanges with context and the interests of those interpreting culture. By showingwhere the concepts of marginality, movement and travel become practically impor-tant, Green successfully shows how the Balkan fractal plays out on the ground (i.e.where theory becomes part of life). More importantly, through these examples, sheargues that statistical and fractal thought are indivisible.

In documenting a cynical approach to government, Green describes Epirus as being “acrossroads between more important places, and that meant political power was contin-ually operating here, but not with Epirus or Epirots in mind” (2005:123). This dualitybrings her to Navaro-Yashin’s (Zizek-influenced) “fantasies of the State” (ibid.:124–5). Green and others have shown that political fantasies (or imagined communities,pace Anderson) have ideological “teeth.” However, the stories Green recounts ofEpirots have very dulled “teeth;” they lack the drama of an earthquake or a landslide.Of course, the Greek-Albanian border differs from others in the Balkans in that men-tion of Pogoni does not readily call up (to the average reader) the violent images ofother Balkan border struggles (cf. Todorova 1997). By referencing the Balkans in thetitle and throughout the book, is Green trying to invoke a “border in pain” (to borrowSeremetakis’ term)? One of the striking ethnographic narratives in the book involvesGreek police challenging workers at a border bus stop. The power play inherent inpolicing this border-crossing is played out as documents are demanded and identitiescalled into question (2005:220–223). Here Green builds on Althusser’s notion of “in-terpellation” to argue that the border crossers claim some agency in the interchange.Although the problem of violent borders is made clear throughout the book, the per-sonal stories of those injured at the border seem largely missing. I would suggest thatAlthusser’s terms “Ideological State Apparatus” and “Repressive State Apparatus”might have likewise contributed to Green’s understanding of policed borders (1984).Even if one can argue that the divide between ideological (symbolic) and repressive(violent) apparatuses is blurry, I am left wondering what is at stake in all this focuson the border.

Green’s attention to physical detail allows us to easily imagine goats meanderingamong oak scrub or asphalt shifting under one’s feet, but not always the thoughts andfeelings of border-crossing humans. Unlike other ethnographic accounts of border-crossing (such as Behar’s “Translated Woman”) no one character haunts me afterreading “Notes.”. In that Green is unwilling to see Epirots as different or exotic, theirportrayal ends up seeming a little flat (2005:7). Nonetheless, Green deserves ourrespect for taking time to focus on people whose lives are not the stuff of newspaperarticles or television dramas. Green excels at the poetics of marginality; “politicalearthquakes,” “cartographic anxiety” and other surprising usages fill the pages of“Notes.” One feels she (and her subjects) could turn dirt into poetry. Indeed, they do,analogizing the rain-soaked terra rossa badlands to blood capable of staining clothes


and skin (2005:116). In essence, Green’s writing offers a strong description of a“weak” soil and its inhabitants; her focus on the Pogoni region looks at geographicissues of soil erosion and land shifts and artfully draws an analogy to the marginalidentity of those who live there.

References Cited

Althusser, Louis1984 Essays on Ideology. London: Verso.

Behar, Ruth1993 Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story.

Boston: Beacon Press.Bourgois, Philippe

1996 Confronting Anthropology, Education, and Inner-City Apartheid.American Anthropologist, New Series, 98(2): 249–258.

Herzfeld, Michael1987 Anthropology Through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in

the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1997 Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. London:Routledge.

Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal2000 “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of

Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities, Ed. P.V. Kroskrity, 35–83.Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Kertzer, David and Dominique Arel, eds.2000 Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in

National Censuses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Papataxiarchis, Evthymios

1999 “A Contest with Money: Gambling and the Politics of Disinter-ested Sociality in Aegean Greece.” In Lilies of the Field: Marginal PeopleWho Live for the Moment, edited by S. Day, E. Papataxiarchis and M.Stewart. 158–75. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Seremitakis, C. Nadia1991 The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.1996 In Search of the Barbarians: Borders in Pain. American Anthropologist,

New Series 98 (3): 489–491.Strathern, Marilyn

1991 Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Todorova, Maria

1997 Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford Press.Tsing, Anna

1993 In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Melissa DemianUniversity of Kent

Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchangebetween British Ova Donors and Recipients

Monica Konrad (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005)

Every once in a while, a work of anthropology appears that offers the possibility forreal innovation within the field – not by claiming to reinvent the discipline – but bydemonstrating that disciplinary knowledge can actually “travel” across ethnographiccontexts. Nameless Relations is one such work. And while its travels are not alwaysperfectly seamless, they are invariably stimulating. The premise of the book is on theface of it straightforward, but almost science fiction-like in its audacity: imagine aworld in which ethicists and policymakers not only listened to anthropologists, butwere willing and able to recognize connections between the fragmentary kinship ofassisted conception in the United Kingdom and the divisible personhood of kinshipand economic practice. . .in Melanesia!

I justify the foregoing exclamation point by way of noting that Pacific anthropologistsin general, and Melanesianists in particular, perennially wonder whether our obser-vations are of interest to anyone outside of this most ineluctably “anthropological”corner of the world. Konrad lays such doubts, to rest with her ludic juxtapositionof ethnographic data from the British fertility clinic with the familiar territory ofkula, moka and other Melanesian technologies of dispersed agency. What happens inthe process is that the multiple and contingent “pathways” (p. 174) of ova donationlook far less alarming than they might otherwise, and the paths traversed by kulavaluables far more accessible. But here’s the trick. There isn’t actually a connectionbetween British ova donors and recipients and, say, Trobriand Islanders exchangingkula valuables. What Konrad does is to make the non-connection itself a species ofconnection.

The book is organized into three sections, with the ethnographic chapters of PartII reaching both “behind” and “in front of ” themselves to inform the theoreticaland policy discussions of Parts I and III. Part II is in turn divided (cell-wise, oneis tempted to say) into chapters describing Konrad’s encounters with ova donorsand ova recipients. It is only when the reader makes the transition from the donorto the recipient chapters that the utter strangeness of the ethnographer’s positionbecomes clear: she is bringing into relation the narratives of people who may havetransacted reproductive substance between them, but will never meet or know eachother’s identities. In so doing, Konrad’s position is not unlike that of the fertility clinicitself, which mediates the exchange of gametes between persons who cannot, by law,have any contact with one another. The peculiarity of this perspective (the socialanthropologist describing a locus of exchange that purports to be asocial and social atthe same time) gives rise to some rewarding analytical forays on Konrad’s part. Theova donors and recipients consistently imagine their relationships to a “somebody”at the other end of the transaction, even though they cannot know that somebody’sidentity. It is in this imaginary extension of relations into the unknown that Konradfinds the lurking gift.


She accomplishes this through the importation of a concept from geology, transilience.A leap from one stratum or substance to another, transilience describes for Konradnot the physiological outcome of ova donation itself, but the relationships envisionedby donors and recipients as a consequence of substance “gifted” between anonymousothers. Anonymity in turn forms the precondition for transilience, and organizes mostof the paradoxes in which Konrad’s interlocutors find themselves. The fundamentalparadox is this: according to the long history of anthropological exchange theory,gifts are defined by their transaction between known persons. This is of coursewhat is supposed to differentiate them from commodities. But according to Britishlaw, human ova can only be transacted between unknown and unknowable persons.Also according to British law, ova donors cannot be paid for their donations. Soova cannot strictly speaking be commodities, although Konrad observes on morethan one occasion that in all other respects apart from the pecuniary they circulateaccording to the logic of commodities. But women involved in ova donation andreception relentlessly conceive (as it were) of the transaction as a gift. This notionpresents Konrad with a question for the anthropological ages: what kind of gift movesbetween transactors who will never know each other’s identity, and which futhermorewill never be reciprocated? Is it still a gift?

By now it should be clear where the real strength of this book lies. Anthropologyhas produced over the last fifteen years a rigorous literature on the relationshipsbetween assisted reproduction, kinship, gender and law. What makes Konrad’s mostrecent contribution to this literature different is the way she takes up “old” topics inanthropological theory and suggests that the forms of sociality implicit in British ovatransactions are explicit elsewhere, and asks perfectly reasonably whether there isa fruitful dialogue to be built between them. For example, both the Maussian spiritof the gift and Levi-Strauss’ generalized exchange appear in Konrad’s analysis. Butwhen both are refracted through the phenomenon of people detaching literal parts ofthemselves and sending them into literal circulation in an economy of potential kinrelations, exchange theory winds up looking quite cutting-edge and the conundrumsof assisted conception rather old hat. Konrad performs this sleight of hand with thestrange and the familiar on purpose. Isn’t it after all supposed to be anthropology’sgift to social theory? But in order to take her ethnographic interventions even further,she asks how the most central feature of British ova donation – anonymity – troublesthe waters of exchange theory.

Here, for instance, is Konrad discussing some of the implications of the principle of“strong anonymity,” the absolute effacement of any information that might enable ovadonors and recipients to identify each other, initially favored by the UK Human Fer-tilisation and Embryology Authority. “Untraceability is about ensuring non-linkagebetween a specific individual’s identity as ex-donor and other parties who may claima potential interest in accessing information about that person. The irony, of course, isthat donor disinterest may feature simultaneously as the very semblance of the ‘freegift’” (p. 87). It is in moves like this one that Konrad is at her best. She demonstrateshow one of the central suppositions in the formulation of British assisted conceptionpolicy, that people will only be inclined to donate gametes if they are assured thatthere will be no possibility of their donation being traced by recipients, flies in the face

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of the central supposition of the classic distinction between gifts and commodities.Commodities are alienated from their producers; gifts are not. So the task for Konradis to demonstrate both how anonymity both is not the same as alienation, and is notthe same as the non-knowledge it is presumed to be by the framers of reproductivepolicy in Britain.

In this respect Konrad’s enterprise is strongly reminiscent of an older book on childadoption, namely Judith Modell’s Kinship with Strangers (University of CaliforniaPress 1994). At several points in Nameless Relations Konrad is at pains to clarifyhow different the transaction of gametes is from the transaction of children. CertainlyKonrad’s informants see no connection between the two. I am perhaps not as con-vinced of the disconnect as they are, if only because Konrad’s careful ethnographydemonstrates how the policy of anonymity in Britain is informed by the very sameanxieties about “too many” relations that informed much Euro-American policy onadoption until the “open adoption” movement of the 1990s. Even in this arena, asKonrad notes in her opening and closing chapters, genetic activists clamor for more“openness” in the gamete donation process, on the principle that everyone benefitsfrom having more relations to draw upon, or at least more knowledge of potentialrelations.

Unlike adoption, ova donation makes these processes of concealment and “uncon-cealment” (to use Konrad’s term) hyper-explicit. Konrad gives us the concept ofthe hyper-embryo. This is the “remainder” from the in-vitro fertilization processwhich has not been implanted, is cryopreserved, and signifies a contingent and ever-ramifying future of either donation to further anonymous others, use in scientificresearch, use as a source of embryonic stem cells or even embryonic ova if female, ordestruction. It is this surplus of unanticipated trajectories that cause the ova recipientsin Konrad’s study the most discomfort, rather than the possibility of connection totheir ova donors or to other children conceived through the same donor. They wishto “cut off” this excessive future, not the past or present whose limits are known, orat least potentially knowable.

At this point Konrad’s own transilient links to Melanesian ethnography start todisappear, just when one might suppose they had the most significant role to play.Where, for instance, is the literature on malanggan, the funerary artifacts from NewIreland whose entire purpose is to concentrate all potential past and future relationswithin their material presence, and then to safely “finish” these relations when they aredestroyed? Neither these nor the similarly-themed mortuary exchanges of the Massimculture area are brought into conversation with the problem of how to forestall therelations of the hyper-embryo, and one wonders if there are in the end some gapsbetween contexts that even transilience cannot breach. Melanesian societies that bothinitiate and complete a field of relations at death may be too far removed from theEuro-American social imagination to access in the context of social objects – embryos– whose very status as living entities is open to debate.

As with any properly risk-taking endeavor, there are pitfalls to this book. For onething, Konrad takes too long to bring the reader to her ethnography, and it is notclear why she thinks the policymakers she so dearly wants to read this book will not


be frightened off by the invocation of Lacan and Strathern in the opening chapters.In order to “catch” the cross-disciplinary audience she overtly envisages for thebook, she might more fruitfully have opened with what is now Part II and movedmore stealthily from there to the theoretical heavyweights. As it stands, NamelessRelations is such a stimulating ethnographic foray that its value to anthropology isindisputable, but at the same time it is perhaps a book only anthropologists could love.Konrad possesses a captivatingly idiosyncratic authorial voice. But even as I relishpronouncements such as “The discursive shift from the biogenetic register to theprimacy of the gestational that accompanies the divisibility of maternity empties theterm of its cultural meaning but floods it simultaneously with excess ambivalence”(p. 108), I can’t help wondering who besides another anthropologist will even make itto the end of that sentence, let alone take pleasure in it. I want as much as Konrad doesfor this complex, nuanced and original ethnography to find its way into the hands andminds of those who work with and govern the reproductive technologies in Britainand elsewhere. But I question too whether she is counting on a greater potentialfor transilience between the practitioners of those disciplines and the discipline ofanthropology than actually exists.

Derick FayUnion College

REVIEW ESSAY

Democracy and Traditional Authorities in South Africa

Constituting Democracy: Law, Globalism and South Africa’s PoliticalReconstruction

Heinz Klug (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of the Land in South AfricaLungisile Ntsebeza (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005)

Each of these volumes by South African scholar-activists is a significant piece ofscholarship. Klug’s work illuminates the hybrid of international and local forms thatemerged in South Africa’s constitution. Ntsebeza’s work offers a historical analysis ofthe relation between “tradition” and property in a corner of the rural Transkei, as thecornerstone of a broader argument about the incompatibility of hereditary authorityand electoral democracy. Read together, these two works provide background andinsight into a current court case in South Africa that challenges a central element ofindirect rule and apartheid-era homeland policies: the control of land by traditionalauthorities (chiefs and headmen).

In late April 2006, four rural South African communities brought a court case chal-lenging the constitutionality of the Communal Land Rights Act (CLRA) of 2004.As in indirect rule systems across much of Africa, the South African colonial and

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apartheid states had empowered traditional authorities to allocate and administer landheld under “communal” tenure, often transforming local systems and creating newoffices and office-holders in the process (see. Colson 1971). While previous drafts ofthe CLRA had aimed to democratize control over land, the final version of 2004 con-tained provisions that could put land administration and allocation under traditionalauthorities. The case is currently before the Pretoria High Court and may go beforethe Constitutional Court in the coming year. As Mahmood Mamdani has argued inCitizen and Subject, democratization in rural Africa would require dismantling andreorganizing the local state institutions that African governments had inherited fromcolonial-era indirect rule policies (Mamdani 1996:25–27). The current court caserepresents an attempt to do so by means of the judicial review of the constitutionalityof legislation, an approach that has only been possible in South Africa since the endof apartheid.

Heinz Klug’s Constituting Democracy: Law, Globalism and South Africa’s Polit-ical Reconstruction (2000) gives an account of the formation of South Africa’sconstitution. The book draws on the author’s experiences in the negotiations overSouth Africa’s first post-apartheid constitution as a member of the African NationalCongress’s (ANC) Land Commission in the early 1990s. Klug’s analysis centers onthe relation between international norms and trends and the particularities of SouthAfrica’s history. Invoking Homi Bhabha, he shows how South Africa’s constitutionemerged in a “realm of hybridity, created by the interaction of local participation, con-text and history with international influences and conditionalities” (Klug 2000:117).

Constituting Democracy focuses on a key—and historically unprecedented—condition that made the challenge to the CLRA possible: the establishment of aConstitutional Court, providing for independent judicial review of the constitution-ality of laws made by Parliament. South Africa’s prior constitutions (1909 and 1961)were grounded in a British parliamentary system in which parliamentary authoritywas supreme, often leaving the courts at the service of apartheid policy-makers (pp.31–35). International influences contributed to the incorporation of judicial review inthe post-apartheid interim (1993) and final (1996) constitutions, creating a “shift inpower to the courts” (p. 14). Within its first year of existence, both the new majorityand the old elite brought cases before the court, and acknowledged the authority ofits decisions (Klug 2000:181).

In the 1990s, South Africa’s political transition took place in an international political“culture of constitutionalism” (p. 69), shaped by a range of influences includinghuman rights law, the Namibian peace process of the 1980s, and the World Bank’semphasis on the “rule of law” in Africa. Klug recounts debates within the ANC inexile in the 1980s over the future of parliamentary sovereignty. By 1990 the ANChad “clearly adopted constitutional supremacy” (p. 83) and called for the creation ofa constitutional court, explicitly linking its positions to international human rightsdocuments and foreign constitutions (p. 84). Around the same time, following “anextensive study of international law and human rights regimes” (p. 84), the then-rulingNational Party accepted the principle of judicial review. Early in the negotiationsover the political transition, in December 1991, the ANC and NP agreed that the


new Constitution—still to be written—would be “guarded over by an independent,non-racial and impartial judiciary” (Klug 2000:85).

While international influences shaped the place of judicial review in the constitution,conditions specific to South Africa played a larger role in determining (or leavingundetermined) the role of traditional authorities: successive stages of constitutionalnegotiations allowed ambiguity to persist around the position of chiefs.

The interim constitution of 1993 left the position of traditional leaders unresolved.The negotiations allowed the incorporation of a diverse mix of principles to guide thewriting of the final constitution; these enabled the process to go forward, “but . . . alsoserved to defer a range of substantive issues” (Klug 2000:107). The principlesincluded the requirement that the constitution recognize “‘traditional leadership,according to indigenous law’” (in Klug 2000:107).

At several points negotiators invoked international norms of human rights to chal-lenge the position of traditional authorities. Lobbying by women’s groups defeated ameasure that would have allowed traditional authorities’ courts to determine whethercustomary law would need to conform to the constitution’s provisions for genderequality. Instead, customary law would be “subject to regulation by law” (Klug2000:111) and implicitly subordinate to the fundamental rights—including genderequality—contained in the Constitution.

But the interim constitution was a “transmutation of [a] global form” (p. 120) thatended up incorporating traditional leaders as a “unique ‘local’ feature” (p. 121), cre-ating provincial Houses of Traditional Leaders that would elect a national Councilof Traditional Leaders. Ironically, the post-apartheid Department of ConstitutionalAffairs came to be “actively engaged in the negotiation of . . . claims to traditionalleadership and . . . succession disputes, so reminiscent of the apartheid regime’s en-couragement and perpetuation of ethnicity and tribalism” (Klug 2000:122).

The provisions for houses and councils of traditional leaders did not survive inthe 1996 Constitution, which acknowledged traditional leadership in suitably vagueterms, while omitting measures regarding the place of traditional leaders in localgovernment, and the possibility of houses and councils of traditional leaders. “Ineffect this removed the constitutional mandate and threw the question of the role oftraditional leaders back into the political arena” (Klug 2000:121), where it remaineduntil the 2006 constitutional challenge to the Communal Land Rights Act of 2004.

Klug’s book is a rich work that could be read from many angles beyond the focus ontraditional authorities that I have taken here. Written by a South African trained andteaching in American law schools, it would be valuable for any scholar undertakingto work on legal and political issues in South Africa. Klug’s perspective as both aconstitutional lawyer, and a participant in South Africa’s constitutional negotiations,gives the book a uniquely valuable place in the growing literature on the transition.Reading the book six years after its publication highlights its enduring value forunderstanding contemporary South Africa.

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In particular, Klug’s discussion of land and property issues—including the contro-versial interventions by the World Bank in South African land policy formation andthe controversial “property clause” of the constitution—illuminate ongoing tensions.Land activists’ initial response to the Bank’s initiatives was “to ask who had invitedit to South Africa” (Klug 2000:130), but they came to see the Bank’s presence asstrategically valuable in keeping the issue of land reform on the policy agenda. “Itsmost enduring impacts may be its endorsement of land restitution and reform on onehand and its [still controversial] emphasis upon the market in achieving these reformson the other” (Klug 2000:132).

The work would also appeal to comparative scholars of constitutionalism and politicaltransitions, providing a nuanced account of the way international norms have beenhybridized with the particularities of the South African situation. While the book asa whole might be inaccessible and too specific as an undergraduate text, selectedchapters would be appropriate in courses on political and legal anthropology, humanrights, and southern Africa.

Lungisile Ntsebeza’s Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of Landin South Africa (2005) combines a broad argument about the appropriate role oftraditional authorities in a democratic society with a finely detailed historical accountof the politics of land in Xhalanga District. Ntsebeza, now an Associate Professorof Sociology at the University of Cape Town, has long been a fierce critic of theCommunal Land Rights Act of 2004 and of traditional authorities’ claims over land.The present work provides his most sustained argument against the transfer of landto traditional authorities, and simultaneously makes an important contribution to thehistoriography of rural South Africa. Ntsebeza’s account of Xhalanga covers theperiod from 1865 to the present, drawing on archival sources and interviews as wellas the author’s personal history as an activist in Xhalanga. The work joins a growingnumber of voices critical of the recent embrace of devolution and decentralization totraditional authorities by African governments and international donors (e.g., Ribot1999; Whitehead and Tsikata 2003).

Ntsebeza’s work offers a reminder that the question of the role of traditional leadershas been in the political arena—or several different and interlocking political arenas—since well before the constitutional negotiations, offering a deeper historical contextbehind the “unique ‘local’ feature” (Klug 2000:121) of traditional authority thatshaped South Africa’s constitution.

The historical chapters of Ntsebeza’s book are an extended study of the historyof land tenure and traditional authorities in Xhalanga District from the 1860s tothe 1990s. Xhalanga is a particularly apt case for the author’s argument againsttraditional authorities’ involvement in land affairs: it was an ethnically diverse, andsocioeconomically and culturally differentiated region where Africans could purchaseland in the late 19th century. The positions of local aspirant chiefs were officiallyabolished by the state in the 1880s (Ntsebeza 2005:56–57).

By the 1950s, however, the state was determined to introduce rule by chiefs underthe 1951 Bantu Authorities Act, despite the fact that many Xhalanga residents had


had no historical connection to any tribal authority for half a century or longer. In1958, Xhalanga was placed under Paramount Chief Kaiser D. Matanzima, a key allyof the apartheid regime within the Transkei. Two local chiefs were put in place underMatanzima, and given authority over land administration and allocation (Ntsebeza2005:131–174).

This incident is central to Ntsebeza’s rejection of Mamdani’s characterization ofindirect rule as “decentralized despotism” (Mamdani 1996). His focus is on the “de-centralized” aspect: “while . . . chiefs in Xhalanga were despotic, they were certainlynot decentralized” (Ntsebeza 2005:213). Rather, “the interference of Matanzima inthe affairs of Xhalanga,” itself tied to larger struggles over the Transkei homelandand its relations to the apartheid project, “made it difficult for the chiefs and TribalAuthorities to exercise independent power” (Ntsebeza 2005:253). At the same time,resistance to the creation of Tribal Authorities in the district limited their practicaleffectiveness: their power sprang from the fact that “rural residents could not gain ac-cess to government resources, including land, without their endorsement” (Ntsebeza2005:253, also p. 293).

Looking beyond Xhalanga, Ntsebeza provides a valuable national-level analysis ofthe ambivalence about traditional leaders’ place in local government. This reflectslongstanding debates within the ANC. The founders of the party included traditionalauthorities, but after the radicalization of the organization from the 1940s, two schoolsof thought began to emerge: one favoring pragmatic alliances with “progressive”chiefs and headmen, and another rejecting collaboration as traditional authoritieswere incorporated more fully into the apartheid regime (Ntsebeza 2005:258).

Since the 1990s, traditional authorities have actively lobbied the ANC. The Congressof Traditional Leaders of South Africa has been particularly effective, under thepresidency of ANC member, attorney, and current Member of Parliament Phathek-ile Holomisa. The Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party has also represented theinterests of traditional leaders, and has been courted by the ANC in the wake of polit-ical violence in KwaZulu-Natal around the time of the political transition (Ntsebeza2005:268–272).

Nevertheless, for nearly a decade after the transition, the government had not defi-nitely resolved traditional leaders’ position with respect to land and local government.Under the interim and final constitutions, Land Affairs and Local Government werelodged in separate and largely independent departments. The former developed aLand Reform White Paper and Land Rights Bill in the late 1990s, which gave no au-thority to traditional authorities, instead focusing on creating participatory processesto enable communities to choose their own form of tenure and land administration.

Local government, in turn, was subject to several rounds of redemarcation and insti-tutional reorganization. While these measures ultimately created elected local struc-tures charged with planning development, the delays involved in restructuring andthe limited resources available meant that in many areas traditional authorities haveremained the most visible and effective agents on the ground (Ntsebeza 2005:13,277–280).

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The state of local government bolsters Ntsebeza’s criticisms of claims that interna-tional “post-modern” influences explain the rise of traditional authorities in post-apartheid South Africa. In several recent works, Barbara Oomen has explained thephenomenon with reference to the global “fragmentation of the nation-state, theembracing of culture, [and] the applauding of group rights” (in Ntsebeza 2005:19).Ntsebeza rejects the causal significance of these trends, seeing them instead as symp-toms of neoliberal policies that have weakened local government, and thereby facili-tated the resurgence of traditional authorities (Ntsebeza 2005:21–22).

To Ntsebeza’s dismay, the ANC enshrined the position of hereditary and unelectedtraditional authorities in two pieces of legislation passed in the run-up to the2004 elections. The 2003 Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Actrecognized “traditional councils” as part of local government, based on existingtraditional councils where they exist. In practice this means they are likely to be basedon the structures entrenched—and in some cases, newly created—under apartheidand homeland policies. The 2004 Communal Land Rights Act went a step further, giv-ing these traditional councils the authority to allocate and administer land (Ntsebeza2005:286–288).

This act is now subject to constitutional challenge. For the coalition of communitiesbringing the case, their allies in other communities, and non-governmental organiza-tions and academia, the case represents the hope that Klug described for the courts,“that constitutional rights will protect individuals and society from the return ofinjustice and oppression” (Klug 2000:181).

One criticism that can be made of Ntsebeza’s work is perhaps intrinsic to the casestudy approach: Xhalanga is, as he says, an unusual case. In some parts of the EasternCape, particularly in the former Ciskei homeland, traditional authorities have beenthoroughly discredited; in others, they retain more popular support. In addition, somecommunities receiving land under land reform policies have unexpectedly embracedthe notion of chieftaincy. For example, in the highveld community of Doornkop,which had been independent of chiefs for decades, some residents called for theestablishment of a chiefly authority to administer land after winning a successfulrestitution claim (James 2006). These cases and others emerging in the literature onpost-apartheid land issues make it clear that the overwhelmingly negative experienceof Xhalanga residents with traditional authorities (while common) is not wholly oruniformly shared. Ntsebeza’s account must be measured against the broader (and ex-tremely incomplete) literature on the place of traditional authorities in contemporaryrural South Africa.

Ntsebeza’s work will interest scholars concerned with indirect rule and its wake, landtenure and traditional authority, and debates over devolution and decentralization.Within the literature on rural South Africa, it offers an important study of an un-derstudied district of the Transkei, highlighting the complexity and variability of theregion. Its level of detail makes it fascinating for those who have worked in the re-gion, but may make it inaccessible or cumbersome to those who have not. This aspectalso limits its utility in the classroom. Chapter one, on theoretical approaches to un-derstanding traditional authority, and chapter eight, on contemporary policy debates,


would be valuable readings for courses on political anthropology and southern Africa,but I would hesitate to assign the book as a whole to undergraduates.

Nevertheless, Ntsebeza’s work offers a compelling argument on the side of thecommunities who are now challenging the constitutionality of the Communal LandRights Act of 2004, and an example of engaged scholarship in the midst of ongoingpolitical struggle. Read together with Klug’s account of the making of South Africa’sconstitution and the emergence of the possibility of judicial review, the text sets thestage for understanding the confrontation between rural community members, NGOs,traditional authorities, and the state now unfolding in South Africa’s courts.

References Cited

Colson, Elizabeth1971 The Impact of the Colonial Period on the Definition of Land Rights. In

Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960, Vol. 3: Profiles of Change: AfricanSociety and Colonial Rule. V. Turner, ed. Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press.

James, Deborah2006 Gaining Ground?: Rights and Property in South African Land Re-

form. London: Glasshouse Press.Mamdani, Mahmood

1996 Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of LateColonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ribot, Jesse1999 Decentralisation, Participation and Accountability in Sahelian Forestry:

Legal Instruments of Political-Administrative Control. Africa: Journal ofthe International African Institute 69(1):23–65.

Whitehead, Ann, and Dzodzi Tsikata2003 Policy Discourses on Women’s Land Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa: The

Implications of the Re-turn to the Customary. Journal of Agrarian Change3(1–2):7–112.

Charles Fruehling SpringwoodIllinois Wesleyan University

REVIEW ESSAY

Packing Heat: Armed Americans and the Meaning of Guns

Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public PolicyBernard E. Harcourt, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Shooters: Myths and Realties of America’s Gun CultureAbigail A. Kohn, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

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Anthropologists have always expressed interest in the relationship between peopleand objects, especially—but not exclusively—handmade, “traditional” objects. Nev-ertheless, collectively, anthropologists have yet to persuasively engage the socialobject that may indeed be the most significant, highly charged register of contempo-rary material culture in the world: guns. Certainly, we have worked with populationswhose members variously desire, witness, own, sell, trade, fear, and indeed shootguns. Yet, save for an occasional mention of the presence of such weapons in field-work settings, most studies attend instead to other extremely important concernsfor the larger-scale processes of conflict, including ethnic violence and the conse-quent displacement and victimization of peoples. Nonetheless, the epistemologiesand methodologies of anthropology are ideal for engaging the material realities andthe social meanings of firearms. What has been missing, generally, is scholarship thatconsiders the everyday relationship of people to their guns.

Although firearms remain largely at the margins of the ethnographic lens, two recentbooks successfully respond to this absence. Shooters: Myths and Realties of Amer-ica’s Gun Culture (2004) by Abigail A. Kohn, and Language of the Gun: Youth,Crime, and Public Policy (2006) by Bernard E. Harcourt, rely upon ethnographicfieldwork and interviews to generate insights into the firearm experiences of twodistinct populations. Guns are ubiquitous in the American society of Kohn and Har-court’s informants, where approximately 250 million firearms are privately ownedand almost 40 percent of American households contain at least one. Kohn, a culturalanthropologist, examined the worlds of a variety of American gun owners—includingsport shooters, hunters, and “cowboy” action shooters—for her doctoral fieldwork atthe University of California, San Francisco. Harcourt, a law professor at the Univer-sity of Chicago, interviewed male youth held in an Arizona correctional facility inorder to unpack their assumptions about the high-powered semiautomatic weaponsso central to their daily lives on the streets. While both of these authors emphasizethe words and experiences of their informants, each attempts in their final chaptersto speak more broadly to the legal and public policy dimensions of firearms.

Starting her research as someone not previously ensconced in gun culture, Kohnbegins the project apparently unpersuaded by either a strong pro- or anti-gun view-point. Nevertheless, she briefly sketches for the reader the highly charged debatein the United States between pro- and anti-gun forces that contextualize everythinghaving to do with firearms. Seeking to move quickly beyond this debate, she dedicatesherself to an analysis of what gun ownership implies for her informants. And despitea range of ideas about what guns mean, from their perceived potential to protect totheir use as instruments of sport and leisure, Kohn’s informants collectively claimthat guns are paramount to their identities as Americans. To own a gun is to enactan American ideology built on such core values as individualism, freedom, and self-reliance. Nearly all of the shooters in Kohn’s book view attempts by the governmentor by lobbying groups to circumscribe the rights of gun owners as a form of politicaland social oppression, contradicting the ethos of what it means to be American.

Kohn also addresses the symbolic and psychological dimensions of gun ownership, interms of how guns inform personhood. That is, she reveals that most of her informants


view the very act of owning, indeed carrying a firearm, tantamount to being a maturecitizen or “a full-status person” in the context of the national landscape. She suggeststhat, “To ‘pack’ a gun, or wear it on your person, is to determine your own fate,ensuring not only your own safety but also personal respect. Carrying a firearmenforces personal boundaries and ensures being treated with dignity” (p. 81).

The act of “packing heat” also resonates deeply with the incarcerated youth inHarcourt’s study, but in ways vastly divergent from Kohn’s informants. Thoughdrawn to firearms in multiple ways, these young men do not voice such themes aspatriotism, frontier romanticism, Republicanism, or the Bill of Rights when talkingabout weapons. For Harcourt’s respondents, the meanings of guns can be categorizedinto three primary clusters. First, guns are viewed as sources of action and protection,associated with danger, attraction, power, incarceration, belonging, and even death.The second cluster Harcourt terms “commodity–dislike,” in which guns are seen aseconomic fungibles to be exchanged and purchased. Youths for whom this holds asignificant meaning are most likely to reject, or dislike, firearms. The final clusterturns on perceptions of the gun as a source of recreation, respect, self-defense, suicide,and as a tool (no different than, say, a screwdriver or a saw).

Harcourt’s analysis is based largely on extensive interviews with thirty of the juvenilesin the detention center, representing diverse ethnic and class backgrounds, both gangand non-gang affiliated. Interviews began with a free association exercise in whichthe young men are given three color pictures of handguns from the Handgunnermagazine. They were asked, then, to express what they were feeling or to detailwhat experiences the images reminded them of. While some respondents expresseddislike for the weapons, many voiced their attraction with such comments as, “Gunsare nice . . . . I just like guns a lot,” or “I’d say they look pretty tight. They lookcool” (p. 37). In spite of the common expressions of infatuation with guns, many ofthe youth acknowledge their danger, in ways that are not common among Kohn’sinformants. For example, a youth of northern European in the Harcourt study reacts,“Dangerous . . . you could get killed by them . . . a couple of my friends got shot . . . .My friend got in a fight with this other guy and he beat up this guy up and he ranin his house and got a gun and started shooting at our car when we were takingoff” (p. 36).

Social scientists will be particularly interested in Harcourt’s analytical approach,which includes a rigorous application of correspondence analysis, in the tradition ofPierre Bourdieu’s coded mappings of judgments of taste. As such, Harcourt identifiessome twenty primary meanings of guns, which he codes for frequency and thencondenses into clusters (outlined above), with primary and secondary registers. Hethen seeks to place the meaning clusters into their “practice” contexts, such as whetheror not the respondents commonly carried firearms. He outlines four distinct gun-carrying practice contexts: “no carry,” in which the youth never had or handled agun; “one carry,” in which the youth carried only one gun on one occasion; “multi-carry,” in which the youth carried two or more guns on his person; or “constant,” foryouths carrying one or more guns at all times. In attempting to distill the results of hiscorrespondence maps, Harcourt resists any urge to over-simplify, always highlighting

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the fluidity of the structures of guns’ meanings, from context to context and fromsocial identity to social identity. He does locate some interesting contrasts, such asthe indication that non-gang youths are more likely to view guns entrepreneurially, interms of their exchange value, while gang youth associate them more with use value(the action–protection cluster).

But just as frequently, Harcourt finds dimensions of meanings that are common to allof the subgroups in his study, regardless of the practice context. For example, gunsare almost universally experienced as sensual, seductive objects, not unlike many ofthe informants in Kohn’s study. Harcourt admits, “The intensity of the attraction, insome cases, is hard to communicate in words. One 17-year-old Anglo youth explains:‘When you go to shoot a gun, you get butterflies in your stomach. You get nervousunless you do it quick’” (p. 94). Albeit less universally, Kohn’s informants in Shootersalso construct the firearm in sensual terms. She quotes Morris, a sixty-somethingbuilding inspector:

I’m content and I’m happy just to hold a gun in my hands. I can’t describeit . . . it’s . . . it’s a work of art, and thing of beauty . . . . There’s art, there’sbeauty, and there’s form and function . . . . Okay, for a man to tell youthis . . . . I would rather fondle a fine firearm than I would a naked woman.Now does that make sense? (p. 12)

“Protection” is another common register, but one that only some of Harcourt’s re-spondents articulate in their gun experiences. On the other hand, the overwhelmingmajority of Kohn’s informants claim protection motivates (in part) their gun owner-ship. To a degree, this is ironic since these San Francisco Bay area residents, largelywhite, are less likely to have been involved in crime-related gun incidents than theyouth in Harcourt’s book.

Both of these books, which do a meticulous job of listening to the voices of theirsubjects, deal with how race and gender relate to guns in less than satisfactoryways. In terms of race, for example, while Harcourt does include this as a variablein his mapping analysis, he does little more than to comment that the recreation–respect cluster is more aligned with Anglo experiences and the action–protectioncluster with Hispanic youths. He confesses that his sample of respondents includedvery few African Americans. Regarding gender, Harcourt’s analysis is surprisinglynon-committal. Although gender—masculinity—is overdetermined in the voices andexperiences of his respondents, and although gunplay and gun violence are conspicu-ously masculinely gendered, Harcourt does not directly address this dimension. Thisis surprising because, given his theoretical orientations—post-structuralism, prac-tice, and performance—he is well positioned to unpack the gendered spaces thatstructure the worlds of these youths. In fact, in a chapter dedicated to sketching theways in which these young men embody scripts of violence and gun use, he drawssubstantially from Judith Bulter’s methods outlined in Gender Trouble, yet withoutforegrounding masculinity per se.

Kohn’s ethnography highlights race only very occasionally, when she quotes, forexample, one of her informants expressing the claim that all races of people should


have access to guns, or another who insists that, in the past, perhaps Native Amer-icans and African Americans would have benefited from firearms in resisting op-pression. What Kohn does not do nearly enough is to contextualize the claimsand opinions of her informants more critically, in terms of their own contradic-tions. For example, that many gun enthusiasts argue that gun control is racistseems more than anything a more recent talking point touted by the NRA, and itis one that belies a much longer history of excluding African Americans, and ofrefusals to build alliances with certain pro-gun black groups, such as the BlackPanthers.

Kohn’s approach to gender is more nuanced and ambitious. Her male informantsclearly express a tendency to view learning about firearms as central to becominga man. Moreover, they claim that knowledge of guns is also important to the ful-fillment of one’s masculine responsibility to protect the “family.” Kohn points outthe inherently sexist character of the notion that men must use guns to protect theirotherwise weaker wives and children. However, she does little more to address thelarger historical and social context in which women have faced violence perpetratedby men, nor does she discuss the idea that guns have frequently served as symbolictotems of masculine dominance. Indeed, guns often carve out the symbolic, homoso-cial spaces upon which male–male intimacy is made possible. Importantly, Kohn’ssubjects include several women, and she strives to situate their experiences with gunsas significant in an otherwise masculinized field of cultural practice. Certainly, thesefemale shooters buy guns for protection, as well as for fun. Yet, curiously, many ofthese women view their firearms as a way of challenging patriarchy:

They very explicitly assert that they perceive those abusive and danger-ous aspects of the patriarchy to be the reason they own guns. Becausegun ownership helps make shooters tough, and tough women defy thepatriarchal belief that women are weak and subservient, female shootersargue that being tough by owning guns is exactly what challenges thepatriarchal tendencies of violent men. [p. 116]

In contrast, other female shooters in the study are attracted to the very notion of agun-owning male as a masculine source of female protection (p. 108).

Both of these books close with an effort to address gun policy issues. Kohn adopts a“centrist” position, offering suggestions for what pro-gun advocates might concede inthe debate, such as moving away from the belief that gun control is completely uselessfor reducing crime. Likewise, she encourages gun-control advocates to appreciate thatshooters, such as those in her study, do not view guns as inherently violent, and tolet go of the notion that guns have no intrinsic social value. Harcourt, after a lengthycritique of historical landscape of legal policies regarding guns, violence, and use,asserts that we should strive to understand the symbolic meanings, objects, and formsof talk central to the lives of criminal juveniles, in order to give them greater controlin living safer lives.

I urge anthropologists to consult these important books, both of which bypass con-ventional accounts of firearms by acknowledging their everyday significance to their

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subjects. We would do well not to ignore the ways in which guns are good (or bad)to begin with, and to see guns as a transformational technology, of the body and itsdimensions. I suspect that the complex relationship of embodiment a gun has withits owner is a very useful starting point for understanding the interpenetration of thecultural and the political, of the local and the global, as we chart a political economyof the firearm, trying to appreciate the persistence of this highly contested culturalobject.

Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture edited by Rebecca Stein and Ted Swedenburg

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Transcript of Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture edited by Rebecca Stein and Ted Swedenburg