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text as a way to reconstitute the meanings of Maya art, and the author substantiates this point with detailed data. Chapter 3 is an eloquent presentation of how to interpret and understand the ways in which a spatial environment lends meaning to the content of art and architecture, influencing i ts formal charac- teristics-physical as well as intellectual and concep- tual. The author begins chapter 3 with a thorough dis- cussion of the commonalities of topographic imagery throughout Mesoamerica and the centrality of caves to Mesoamerican beliefs and ritual practices beginning as early as 5000 B.C. Stone rightly points out that this critical relationship has not been given due considera- tion in Mesoamerican studies @. 7; exceptions include current research by Wendy Ashmore, David Freidel, Matthew Looper, and Vernon Scarborough, among oth- ers).

A stimulating point is Stone's elucidation of the binary characteristics of rock art and how binary cate- gories were a fundamental conceptual principle of Classic Maya society. In chapter 3, the author identi- fies such polarities as sacred versus profane and pub- lic versus private, reiterated by the presence of rock art in a culture, and ties these categories to beliefs and ritual practices by modern Maya. She firmly sets these polarities within the context of Classic Maya iconogra- phy, however, and links these to the pervasive pres- ence of caves and mountains in the Classic period art and architecture.

Chapters 5 and 6 present excellent drawings, pho- tographs, and analyses of all the Naj Tunich paintings, the ample illustrations clearly placing each painting in its speleological geographic context. Stone's analyses of the paintings lead to the realization that the primary theme of all the imagery is "ritual as a lived experi- ence" @. 136). These paintings are the material re- mains of and commentaries on the emotionally charged rites that took place in Naj Tunich. As evi- denced in the imagery, these rites include bloodletting and sacrifice, the burning of incense and drinking, the ballgame as an extension of the underworld, musical accompaniments and ritual performances. Repre- sentations of particular deities, including the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh, also adorn the walls. Stone

Post-Melting-Pot Realism

MICHAEL KEARNEY University of California, Riverside

expertly connects these pictorial representations to Classic Maya rain and renewal ceremonies, ritual sat- ire conveying social criticism, and ritual seclusion in- tegral to vision quest rites. Stone also identifies the hands of ten of the artists whose creations adorn the walls. She concludes that they were members of the Naj Tunich pilgrimage parties, which may have in- cluded shamans, nobles, and other attendants. She notes that the artists may have participated because they also were the presiding shaman or noble visitor.

In chapter 7, Stone joins epigrapher Barbara MacLeod to decipher the 40 hieroglyphic texts for which Naj Tunich is famous. MacLeod and Stone de- scribe these texts as "rare fragments of the Classic Maya's ephemeral mental world [that] offer unique in- sights into their utilization of caves as pilgrimage sites" @. 155). This chapter thoroughly analyzes the texts' glyphic and narrative contents as well as tack- ling the perquisites of the 23 recorded dates (spanning the years A.D. 692-745). The authors thoughtfully pro- vide a narrative summary of the hieroglyphic texts for the nonspecialist, the remainder of the chapter pre- senting detailed decipherments of each text. Their analysis of eight parallel clauses found throughout the cave illuminates the pilgrimage nature of the cave's use. These texts also name the cave rituals' partici- pants and include the signatures of some of the partici- pant-painters. The presence of the tok'-tun-ahaw em- blem glyph may identify the site/polity as the primary user of Naj Tunich, but whose archaeological identity remains unresolved.

Andrea Stone's study of pre-Columbian Maya cave paintings is a thorough and thought-provoking exami- nation of the phenomenon of rock art as an integral part of larger cultural expressive systems. Her mul- tidisciplinary approach reveals the socioritual con- tents of these pre-Hispanic paintings and of the caves themselves and also demonstrates how caves were the basis of Classic Maya sacred space re-created in art and architecture. Her approach underscores the fact that it is the context of a cultural expression and its comparative relationship with other expressive modes that leads to productive analyses of any and all mate- rial culture. =

American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins. Sarah Mahler. Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1995.268 pp.

These two remarkable books advance recent theo- retical and methodological innovations in the anthro-

Neoliberalism, Transnationalization and Rural Pov- erty: A Case Study of Michoacdn Mexico. John Gledhill. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.241 pp.

868 A M E R I C A N A N T H R O P O L O G I S T V O L . 9 8 . N o . 4 D E C E M B E R 1 9 9 6

pology of transnational migration and the trans- national communities that result from it. One of the main challenges to an ethnographic study of trans- national migration is the definition of the community of the migrants. In ethnography, in the classic mode, the definition of community was not problematic. Communities were given to the ethnographer as preex- isting, territorially based, and bounded entities. The deterritorialization and spatial dispersion brought about by migration complicate ethnographers’ defini- tions of the communities that they study and force them to choose between two complementary research strategies. Gledhill takes the more common one that grows out of community-based ethnography, namely, a focus on groups of migrants defined as such by their respective home communities in Mexico. He thus se- lected two acijacent towns in the state of Michoacan that have high rates of migration to the United States, mainly to California. Gledhill did his fieldwork primar- ily in the sending communities and traces the largely circular movements of migrants from these towns as they move into and become ever more dependent on jobs (mainly farmwork) in the United States. He well demonstrates that economic differentiation, family or- ganization, marriage, and gender in the sending com- munities can be understood only within the greater context of this migration.

Mahler adopts the other strategy of focusing on a group of migrants defined both by their nationality and their presence in the receiving communities to which they have migrated. Thus, she defines her migrant community as pockets of recently arrived Salvadori- ans in suburban Long Island. Mahler’s intensive eth- nography on transnational migration into suburbs is a novel innovation that complements the overwhelming focus of anthropological studies of transnational mi- gration into rural areas and inner cities.

Both of these studies are also transnational in that they represent the current trend in ethnography to go beyond a focus on communities per se to a concern with how migrant communities are situated within and affected by the economic and political contexts of the United States and the respective nations from which the migrants come. Thus, Gledhill situates the Mexican side of his study within the context of the massive neoliberal restructuring in Mexico during the 1980s, which provoked the concentration of wealth on the one hand and increasing rural poverty and out-migra- tion on the other. Small rural producers were hit espe- cially hard by neoliberal removal of subsidies, trade barriers, and the state-sponsored agricultural insur- ance. Likewise, in the United States, Gledhill examines the impact of neoconservative policies-the counter- part of Mexican neoliberalism-and the recent in- crease of labor market segmentation on the communi-

ties into which migrants from the periphery implode, thus obliterating the distinction between center and periphery in the new global disorder, which has also been aggravated by NAFTA. Both Gledhill and Mahler also examine unforeseen consequences of the 1986 Im- migration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) on their re- search communities. In the case of Mexico, Gledhill demonstrates that IRCA has been ineffective as a regu- latory mechanism but has raised the cost of migration for poor migrants and has served to widen economic disparities within and between sending communities in Mexico. Meanwhile, Mahler looks at IRCA mainly in terms of how it is a condition added to lack of English, marketable skills, and credentials, all of which con- spire to push Salvadorian migrants into low-paying, dead-end jobs and into a burgeoning informal econ- omy.

Mahler convincingly presents her study as a “nar- rative of disillusionment” that recounts how Sal- vadorian migrants-who are more often than not de facto refugees-flee horrendous conditions in their war-torn country to enter marginal existences in Long Island that “are full of deceit, dejection, marginaliza- tion, and exploitation” @. 3). The Salvadorians in Long Island are “intensely alienated from mainstream Amer- ica and its institutions” and come to “focus their re- sentment on each other” @. 3) Mahler’s principal ob- jective is to explain the origins and perpetuation of these themes of “competition, jealousy, and egoism” (p. 4). She does so by situating them within the macro context of contemporary global capitalism that shapes the social and economic conditions that the Salvadori- ans flee and into which they immigrate.

In El Salvador, most of the immigrants lived lives of economic poverty but resided in communities knit together by extensive relations of economic reciproc- ity that sustain individuals and families in time of need. Most immigrants to the United States first expe- rience the highly commodified impersonal world when they descend into the migrant’s purgatory of Guate- mala and Mexico en route to New York. Extorted and robbed at almost every turn, they nevertheless arrive in New York with illusions about rapidly collecting dollars to remit and take back to El Salvador. These fantasies are soon dashed by the dismal living and working conditions they find waiting for them. And in the case of Mexican migration into California, Gledhill cites literature revealing a relatively new counterpart of the social and economic marginalization that Sal- vadorians encounter in Long Island, namely recently formed rural enclaves of poor migrant farm workers.

The Salvadorian immigrants are rapidly disabused of expectations of the kind of mutual support and reci- procity from their relatives and co-nationalists that or- ganize daily life in their home communities. Mahler

B O O K R E V I E W E S S A Y S 869

examines the decline of reciprocity within the context of the economic realities of the migrant condition. Since most Salvadorian migrants have financial obliga- tions to family members left behind and are also often seeking to finance their trips north for family reunifi- cation, they must save money after paying for their living expenses, the greatest of which is typically rent. Consequently migrants have developed a number of strategies to increase income and decrease costs so as to augment savings. For the most part these strategies for accumulation are elaborated within the informal economy and within the Salvadorian immigrant com- munity. The prime example of this replacement of reci- procity by an impersonal commodification of social relations is what Mahler calls the encargado system, whereby a few migrants are able to rent houses or apartments in which they live while also subletting part of the space to other migrants. In addition to feel- ing that they are being gouged, the secondary renters are stressed by overcrowding, the need as undocu- mented residents to avoid surveillance, and overwork. But such conditions must be endured if one is to accu- mulate savings, which is the primary immediate goal of the migrants.

Instead of tracing the workings of the encargado system and variants of it and the dead-end jobs that are available to them due to inadequate housing and the recently restructured labor markets, the migrants discharge their anger and frustrations against their co- nationals within the migrant community. Thus, "the main culprits are vindicated while the small ones are vilified" @. 208). Gledhill reveals a comparable dy- namic in the Mexican enclaves in California, and herein lies the basis for both Mahler and Gledhill to

Narratives of Jewish Identity

JONATHAN BOYARIN Yale Law School

Sojounzms: The Return of German Jews and the Ques- tion of Identity. John Borneman and Jeffrey M. Peck. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.309 pp.

Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Yael Zerubavel. Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1995.340 pp.

The Mas& Myth: CoUective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel. Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.401 pp.

John Borneman and Jeffrey Peck provide in So- journers a portrait gallery of Jews in Germany today,

critique widely accepted assumptions of migrant eth- nic solidarity.

Gledhill argues that the primary structural condi- tions shaping Mexican-U.S. migration and impeding as- similation and acculturation of immigrants are neolib- era1 restructuring and "flexible accumulation" in the sending and receiving nations. Transnational migra- tion so structured results in an "ethnicization of class" @. 12) that creates undigestible differences within the receiving nation-state. Mahler comes to the same con- clusion and notes that the recent shift in migration research from assimilationist assumptions to ones of ethnic solidarity are unfounded, for as her ethnogra- phy of the commodification of relations among immi- grants reveals, such a sociology is inimical to such solidarity. Or, as Gledhill puts it, "the victims of these processes may be drawn to interiorize elements of the hegemonic discourse in a way which divides the subal- tern classes" @. 22). Thus transnational communities may become divided internally and "hostile to mem- bers of other such communities" @. 210).

In sum, these two studies represent a maturation of the anthropology of transnational migration in that they present comprehensive bottom-to-top research on topics ranging from economics to worldview. Also, each in its own way is a good example of multisite ethnography that situates questions of political econ- omy and identity within transnational communities that in turn are examined within greater historical- structural contexts. And in doing so, both authors present less than sanguine assessments of migration and the American dream, which for migrants has, as Gledhill implies @. ISS), become a series of night- mares.

all of whom were either born in Germany or had par- ents who were German Jews. The original interviews were conducted in the late 1980s, and thus the inter- viewees were at the time residents of both West and East Germany. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the re- unification of Germany disrupted the research plan, as the authors frankly discuss. Each of the 11 interviews thus contains a postscript written by the subject, dis- cussing the impact of reunification on the subject's sense of Jewishness and German identity. An introduc- tion and a conclusion, written separately by the two authors, reflect on the book both as an exercise in dialogic ethnography and as a study in the possibilities of conceiving group identity in other than nation-sta- tist terms. Brief commentary by the authors is inter-