BOOK REVIEWS / Sociocultural Anthropology 379

begun to transform theworldofthe"ironsurgeon,"andshepre-sents striki ng documentation of the dynamics of powerembod-ied within the domain of gender and medical practice. The bookshould be read by anthropologists and surgeons, as well asgeneral readers interested in the subject of women, health,and healing. •»

Social Assessments for Better Development: Case Studiesin Russia and Central Asia. Michael M. Cernea and AyseKudat, eds. Introduction by Johannes Linn and Ismail Ser-ageldin. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1997. 207 pp.

DAVID ABRAMSONBrown University

As Johannes Linn and Ismail Serageldin point out in their in-troduction to this edited volume, social and economic knowl-edge production is indispensable to the World Bank's main "ap-plied" work of "[p]romoting socially and environmentallysustainable development to reduce poverty" (p. xvii). Indeed,this volume produces knowledge with a vengeance. Its knowl-edge-generators' other purpose is to "codify" research proce-dures for the sake of more efficient and comparable analysesfrom one study to the next. Social assessment is the instrumentthese authors use to harness this codification in the service ofdevelopment.

This volume's strength is that it demonstrates the utility of so-cial assessment studies for a wide range of development issuesincluding the use of water and fuel resources, transport, sanita-tion, health, and postwar social network reconstruction. Thefirst two chapters thoughtfully present the context and then theconceptual, methodological, and operational issues. Samplestudies from each of the Central Asian republics (Azerbaijan,Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbek-istan) and Russia follow as separate chapters. In reading theseven social assessment case study chapters, I was impressed bythe integration of data from different methods including sur-veys, semiformal interviews, and focus groups to observation.

The volume's weakness, by the admission of one of itsauthors (Jonathan Brown, p. 31) is that the practitioners of socialassessment in development work, at least at the World Bank,have a long way to go before sloppiness gives way to a "standardof professionalism" with an acceptable degree of "quality con-trol" (p. 31). This "standard of professionalism," Brown claims,has been perfected in the other types of analysis—economic, fi-nancial, and technical—the Bank has engaged in for decadesaround the world. I wondef though if Brown is not shooting him-self (or his project anyway) in the foot here. In suggesting thatthese other types of analysis have developed over the years to ahigh level of effectiveness (assuming this is what he means by"professionalism"), why then do we need new types of analysissuch as social assessments?

Finkel and Garcia's chapter on fuel use in Kyrgyzstan is theweakest. While the authors reveal their research methods, theydo not give the reader a sense for how effective these methodswere in collecting data. For example, the reference to the use offocus groups in the chapter's introduction is not pursued.Ultimately, this chapter provides useful quantitative data,

but provides no sense that one is hearing from the peoplethemselves.

The two chapters that deal with water, sanitation, and healthissues in the Aral Sea regions of Uzbekistan and Kazakstan offermuch more data and are stronger efforts at "[p]utting people firstwhen investing in development" (p. 140). While each of thesechapters fits into the volume's larger goals of "perceiving peo-ple as intended beneficiaries rather than as targets of project im-pacts, and tailoring a project's design and implementation totheir needs and capabilities" (p. 140), they tend toward separat-ing World Bank project priorities from those of the locals whoare consulted. I heard earlier versions of these chapters pre-sented on a panel at the meetings of the American Anthropologi-cal Association and felt then as I do now that the Bank's priori-ties (or at least framings of problems) are superseding localones. For example, in the chapter on Uzbekistan, the authors ad-vocate a needs assessment strategy in which data from detailedhousehold surveys are analyzed by team surveyors to supple-ment direct questions asking residents to rank what they con-sider to be the main problems facing them in their daily lives.Out of the top eight most serious problems, the authors focus onthe needs to improve water and sanitation, which occupy thefourth and eighth positions, respectively, in order of locally per-ceived needs, whereas lack of food, lack of money for flour, andlack of fuel are considered to be the top three problems by locals(table5.5,p. 124).

In the chapter on Kazakstan, the authors make use of quotesfrom focus group discussions in a very oblique and circum-scribed way—by enclosing them, in a style more familiar innewspapers and textbooks, in colored boxes at random intervalsthroughout the chapter. Designed, I imagine, to highlight theimportance of local perspectives, this approach accomplishesthe opposite effect of segregating them from the project andcoming off as the textual equivalents of photographs of starvingchildren. Integrating these disembodied "voices" into the largerproject narrative, if done well, would have given the reader atleast a sense that people were being put first, if not actually forc-ing the authors to build their project on and around those voices.

In this way, I found the chapter on Baku's water supply to bemore effective. Short ethnographic case studies are boxed andpresented in a contextualized form that enriches the authors'study and makes a good case for the social assessment approach.Local strategies and concerns are also taken into account in thestudy on the problems of Ashgabat's public transport system.Here, the authors integrate the problems, assumptions, differentinterest groups, responses, and recommendations into a well-wrought case study. The project conveyed a realness that mademe wish that the results of adopted policies and their implemen-tation were included in the study, although this was true for all ofthe case studies.

The final chapter on Tajikistan by John Schoeberlein-Engel(consistently misspelled as Schoerberlein-Engel throughout thebook) is something of an anomaly in this volume, yet is interest-ing if only because its focus on the role of social networks andcollective identities in rebuilding society after the ravages ofwar departs from conventional "development" concerns. Otherthan a confused first sentence with circular logic and mixedmetaphors—"The violence that shredded the fabric of Tajikis-tan society during the 1992 civil war was the result of the long-term breakdown of the social structures that sustained social

380 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 102, No. 2 • JUNE 2000

order" (p. 199)—Schoeberlein-Engel proceeds to offer a coher-ent and materially grounded narrative of the interplay be-tween different communities, regions, identities, and interestsin the war. Despite the lack of in-depth ethnographic and othersurvey data (in this way the chapter is anomalous), he provides athoughtful framework for future social assessment type workwith the goal of restoring trust in this war-shattered society.

Finally, the chapter on restructuring the coal industry in fourof Russia's extraction centers is long, covering vast territoriesand large numbers of people, compared to the other studies in-cluded in this volume. Ultimately, despite offering several setsof "recommendations" about how to accommodate different in-terest groups while providing social safety nets for the poorest, itfails to provide a convincing and coherent plan. The chapter isinteresting reading for its historical coverage. This failure andthe successes of certain other chapters mentioned above merelyreinforce what I already believed, which is that even the WorldBank, with vast financial resources and expertise at its disposal,is best suited to assisting with smaller projects. At the very least,it makes readers realize how difficult a job lies ahead for socialassessment practitioners to improve their techniques and thencoordinate with other specialists at the Bank.

Without the kinds of data and analysis used in these social as-sessments, prescriptions for improvement and "better develop-ment" are often abstract and tend to be more about reproducingidealized likenesses of our own ways of getting things done.This is essentially a form of colonization from afar rather thanattempts to understand the logic behind the way people respondto certain conditions and why people pursue certain interests.This mirroring approach unfortunately pervades much develop-ment work, which is conducted under the guise of rational eco-

nomics.

Across the Boundaries of Belief: Contemporary Issues inthe Anthropology of Religion. Morton Klass and Maxine K.Weisgrau, eds. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. 416 pp.

Religion and Magic: Approaches and Theories. GrahamCunningham. New York: New York University Press, 1999.126 pp.

MICHAEL WINKELMANArizona State University

Klass and Weisgrau provide an edited book of 20 articles allreprinted from previous journal publications; nearly half ofthem appeared in Man and American Ethnologist. The majorityof the articles were published in the 1980's, the rest in the1990' s. The origins of these articles in previous publications hasresulted in a collection that is high quality and very readable.The areas of coverage and articles selected were deliberatelychosen to avoid traditional topics extensively covered in otherbooks. Instead the editors selected articles reflecting what theyviewed as exemplifying principal areas of the current scholar-ship in the anthropology of religion. The articles are groupedinto five major sections: Colonialism and Post-Colonial Lega-cies; Gender and Sexuality; The Healing Touch and AlteredStates; Religion and the State; and Change and Continuities.

The book is designed to acquaint students with the contempo-rary work in the anthropology of religion and is intended as asupplement to textbooks covering the history and theory of theanthropology of religion. The editors have also provided an in-troduction to the book and separate introductions to each sectionthat contextualize the specific articles within the broader frame-works of anthropology. These introductory materials introducesome of the controversies, establish the major themes of the arti-cles of the section, and raise questions for discussion. Each sec-tion also has a short list of selected readings to guide students to-ward additional research materials.

The introduction addresses anthropology's role in the West-ern cultural approaches to magico-religious practice, placingthe inquiries within the context of the conflict of "science" and"belief" and the uncomfortable issues this engenders. Anthro-pology's tendency to characterize religion as universal and in-trinsically similar across cultures has troubled the "true be-liever," as well as raised questions about distinguishing thereligious consciousness of moderns and so called "primitives."The editors point out how traditional figures in anthropologyoften shied away from addressing the implications of their workfor their own culture, instead preferring to focus on the distantand primitive other. But as contemporary approaches questionthe traditional biases that often characterized religious practicesas mentally aberrant or deceitful, new perspectives are emerg-ing that see religious practices as having an empirical compo-nent and contributing to understanding of cutting-edge ques-tions about the nature of consciousness.

The roles of religion in intergroup dynamics are explored inthe opening section's considerations of "Colonialism and Post-Colonial Legacies" and its focus on missionaries' interactionswith local cultures. Articles written by Claude Stipe, JudithShapiro, Sergi Kan, and Morton Fried provide analyses of an-thropologists' conflicts with missionaries and cultural re-sponses to the processes of forced Christianization and prosely-tizing. The politics of religion are also addressed by articles inthe section "Religion and the State," where the editors point outhow cleric-run political systems complicate the definitions of"states" as based upon coercive power. This contributes to thedifficulty in effectively separating religion and politics becauseof their intertwined belief systems and practices. Indeed religionmay contribute to state formation and national identity. Articlesin this section by Douglas Hollan, Robet Weller, Emelie Olson,and Peter Whiteley explore the boundaries between religion andpolitics, undermining any presumption of a neat categoricalseparation of these conceptual areas. Politics may ally with re-ligion to gain support from certain social sectors, and religionmay serve as a means of cultural and political resistance againstoppressive state systems. This role of religion in intergroup dy-namics is also emphasized in the section on "Changes and Con-tinuities," where articles by Benny Giay and Jan Godschalk,Neil Savishinsky, Benton Johnson, and Susan Harding examinethe ways in which religion provides for both continuity with thepast and adaptation to rampant change. Reversing the popularsaying, the editors' review suggests that "the more religionchanges, the more it remains the same." They point to the role ofreligion in cultural change and adaptation, challenging thenotion that converts are psychologically or socially disturbedpeople.