BOOK REVIEWS

Nusrat S Chowdhury
University of Chicago

In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics,

Environmentalism, and Insurgency
in Jharkhand, India.
Alpha Shah (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)

When speaking to the anthropologist, a senior forest officer in Jharkhand, the location
of Alpa Shah’s ethnography of indigeneity and politics in India, says this: “First, they
[the primarily Munda populations of rural Jharkhand] must learn how to chase the
elephants. Second, they must not keep rice in their houses. Third, they must learn
how to worship Ganesh Devta. And fourth, they must stop drinking rice beer and
mahua wine” (p. 121). The state official’s dictum sounds uncannily resonant with the
allegations of impurity and sloth that have long been used to stereotype indigenous
peoples in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. The flip side of such proscriptions
would be the sanitized and marketable image of the adivasi (indigenous) as mobilized
by the educated, urban activists who speak on their behalf. The parallel narratives of
denigration and recuperation are two sides of the same representational coin, which
Shah has traced in her sympathetic reading of everyday life in a Jharkhandi village.
Both are familiar registers in which the indigenous citizen – as a figure of desire
and disapproval – has been historically mediated. In her book, In the Shadows of the
State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India,
Shah details the limits to each as she offers a glimpse into her informants’ daily life
with much sensitivity and conceptual clarity.
The book, its author claims, is a journey in understanding how and why, in the
shadows of the postcolonial, secular state, the contradictory opinions about what
constitutes indigeneity might co-exist. She introduces terms such as eco-savage and
eco-incarceration in order to show that activist interventions and state developmen-
tal initiatives, well-meaning as they may be, have reconfigured and in most cases
reproduced long-standing hierarchies. The impoverished adivasi remains marginal to
upper-caste and upper-class uses of the resources of the state, on the one hand, and
on the other, the recognition accorded by transnational political alliance. Her obser-
vations, when situated in the backdrop of the newly founded state of Jharkhand –
the political outcome of one of the oldest autonomy movements in India – are situated
claims about the ambivalent yet undeniably powerful role of the state in the lives of
the most marginal of its populations.
When a Munda informant tells Shah that a Jharkhand sarkar [state] could only bring
their exploitation closer (p. 5), she senses a deep disjuncture between the official
version of Jharkhandi nationalism and the words of her friends and neighbors in the

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 35, Number 1, pps. 135–154. ISSN
1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934.  C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2012.01183.x.
Page 136 PoLAR: Vol. 35, No. 1

village of Tapu, a theme that informs the rest of her research. She starts by offering
a reading of the traditional institution of parha, a sacral polity that serves dispute-
solving functions and co-exists with the law-enforcing modern state. The Munda
view points to the importance of the idea that indigenous systems of governance are
locally significant because they embody an idea of politics which is indivisible from
the spiritual realm (p. 64). The next chapter aims to resignify the term corruption that
is often tossed around to understand rural political economies coalesced around state-
funded development projects. Documenting in detail the transactions and mediations
involved in laying claims on governmental resources, particularly fiscal ones, Shah
urges for a more nuanced take on the illicit that considers the multiple moral and
political economies that affect social actions and relations.
In a suggestive reading of the status of the elephant in official and activist imaginaries,
in chapter 3, Shah tracks the ways in which the value of the jungle and the animal
eclipses that of the rural adivasis who live in the intimacy of both. The adivasis are
prevented from killing the plundering animals that jeopardize their existence when
the state of Jharkhand chooses the elephant as its emblem and as the forests become
reified objects of conservation. The next chapter on eco-incarceration unravels the
moralizing cultural politics that binds nature, land, and indigeneity together to the
point of restricting the Munda to their natal village. This trend negates the long his-
tories of migration that constitute Munda past and aims at producing an image of
pure, sedentary adivasi bodies. The Maoist insurgency vibrant across the region is the
backdrop of the last chapter. Here, the author explores the often mutually advanta-
geous exchanges between the rural elite and the Maoist insurgents. In an admittedly
complex scenario, the state and the insurgents, their antagonism notwithstanding,
mimic each other in both form and action. The rural poor of Jharkhand, as always,
remain cautious of both.
As a reader, there were analytical possibilities that I thought could be further explored
in an otherwise rich ethnography. For instance, the recurrent use of the concept post-
colonial state made me question its analytic purchase when it is quite clear that the
indigenous people in rural Jharkhand have long lived in a colonial relationship with
their elite counterparts as well as the state. What is it about postcoloniality that is
relevant here, and could we broaden the notion to incorporate the realities of indige-
nous groups such as the Munda? The author’s analysis of the relationship between
the state and its indigenous populations also appears too straightforward at times.
Though skeptical of the state, the Munda, like other subaltern groups anywhere, also
partake of many state spectacles, such as the elections. Beyond their skepticism, how
does one account for such rituals of state-making and people’s affective investments
into them while taking into account the recurrent marginalizations that such processes
engender? I would have also liked to see longer excerpts of interviews to get a sense of
how authority, identity and politics are made and unmade in moments of interaction.
The point would not be to seek an unmediated “native” voice, but to add more depth
to what are already vivid ethnographic observations.
It is a pleasure to read In the Shadows of the State for its delicate handling of
such formidable concepts as the state, governance, indigeneity, corruption, and
May 2012 Page 137

conservation. Shah makes a case for her lucid style by announcing at the outset
that writing an academic text is a political act, and that she has aimed to produce
a book that would be approachable even to the noninitiates. This, of course, is not
to say that the book lacks rigor. The monograph boasts pages of notes at the end in
which its author outlines and acknowledges her intellectual debts. Readers interested
in these issues, within and beyond academia, stand to learn much from Alpa Shah’s
book.

Azra Hromadzic
Syracuse University

Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor

Paula M. Pickering. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)

Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor by Paula Picker-
ing is an analysis of the internationally designed peace-building project in Bosnia
and Herzegovina (BiH) and the responses of “ordinary people” to these–at times
intrusive–interventions. In order to enrich her analysis, the author utilizes a vari-
ety of methods, including surveys, participant-observation (primarily conducted in
Sarajevo and Bihać, two towns in the Federation of BiH) and interviews, producing
an expansive, reflexive and dynamic account.
Pickering reveals the shortcomings of the external peace-building project in BiH
by developing the multilevel network model to capture behaviors of “ordinary mi-
norities” (the model looks at how ordinary minorities respond to and engage with
nationalizing state, transnational actors, external homelands, local minority activists,
and national minority activists). She utilizes theories of social capital and self-
understanding to analyze her data and to reveal that the peacebuilding efforts are
often rejected and understood as too elitist, simplistic, and rigid by ordinary people,
especially those who find themselves boxed into the category “minority” (people
who, according to their ethnicity, live in the “wrong” part of the state). In order to
capture these experiences, Pickering descends from the ground of elitist politics to
the terrain of society and culture, seeking the stories of ordinary Bosnians whom
she approaches as active agents at the heart of the peacebuilding project. This broad
conceptualization of the “field” allows for in-depth analysis of the Bosnian situation
and application of “the Bosnian experience” to other postwar societies.
One of the most important and policy-relevant contributions of this reflexive and
multileveled account is its straightforward central argument that “the ordinary peo-
ple influence the implementation of peacebuilding projects through their everyday
reactions to these programs”(p. 3). While the author, by using multiple theories and
methodologies, does a fine job in supporting her main argument, there are several
aspects of this work that could be improved. For example, Pickering’s ethnography
often appears “thin”; the account would benefit from more vivid ethnographic descrip-
tions of people’s homes in Sarajevo and Bihać, of dusty, smelly, and rubbish-covered
Page 138 PoLAR: Vol. 35, No. 1

streets, of half-reconstructed buildings, and of coffee-shops packed with unemployed

youth. As a result of the thin ethnographic descriptions, the poetics of everyday life
is lost in the account. Instead, the account relies heavily on Pickering’s informants’
words and descriptions, and not on the author’s rich descriptions of people’s situated
practices.
Furthermore, one of the most important aspects of Pickering’s argument is that
interest-based theory does not capture nor explain ordinary minorities’ ways of life
and political action; instead, the author relies on theories of social capital and identity-
based (self-understanding) theoretical approaches. While this move seems valid given
the author’s findings, the author dismisses the interest-based theory too quickly—
the definition and description of this theoretical approach appears to be rushed and
mechanical.
In addition, by constructing a complex, multilevel network model, the author com-
promises the analytic complexity of the core concepts at the heart of her analysis.
As a result, she ends up producing troubling dichotomies (e.g., urban vs. rural, top
vs. bottom, and ordinary vs. elitist) and concepts that need further elaboration and
unpacking. For example, the central notion of the ordinary is left analytically unex-
plored, while the author’s descent into the ordinary lives of Bosnians demonstrates
its enormous theoretical complexity and political potential. The account would thus
benefit from theoretical explorations and elaborations of the notion of “ordinary” and
its complicated relationship to the concepts of “minority” and “normal life.” Instead,
the author glosses over these concepts and uses them as already established “facts”
of social life, regardless of their proven fluidity, potentiality and complexity. Simi-
larly, the notion of “self” is generalized and the concept of “cultural groups” is used
synonymously with “ethnic groups.” This replacement of “ethnicity,” which author
rightly sees as limiting and over-politicized in the Bosnian context, is problematic,
however—the three main “ethnicities” in Bosnia (Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians or
Bosnian Muslims) share a great degree of “culture,” so separating them into dis-
tinct cultural groups does not seem adequate and it does not resolve the “ethnicity
problem”—it only displaces it into the realm of culture.
In several instances the author reflects beautifully on her genuine uneasiness about
guessing and speculating the ethnic identities of her informants’ (in Bosnia one’s
name usually tells people who you “are”). In addition, the author convincingly iden-
tifies the problem present in the majority of the analyses of the Bosnian war—the
continuous use of ethnic identification and ethnic antagonism as the points of depar-
ture. Throughout the book, however, the author consistently uses ethnic markers next
to the names of her informants, even in those instances where ethnic identifications
do not help our understanding. In this way, indirectly, the author internalizes and
reproduces the rigid ethnic discourse about Bosnia, even though she strongly argues
against it.
Regardless of these limitations, the book is a fresh addition to the majority of political
science analyses of the postwar peace-building efforts in Bosnia which primarily focus
on the political elites and leave the complexity of everyday life largely unexplored.
The book should be of great interest to scholars, practitioners and policy-makers
May 2012 Page 139

interested in improving peace-building and state-making projects in post-conflict

Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond.

Anastasia Hudgins
Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India
Prabha Kotiswaran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)

Kotiswaran’s analysis, put into practice, has the capacity to reconfigure distributions
of power for sex workers whose labor exists in an arena where moral panic has
pushed states and supra-states to enact laws and policies that conflate trafficking
with labor migration, and where the discourses of victimhood and disease control
provide narrowly conceived definitions of the problem of sex markets which funnel
into “solutions” that are necessarily blunt and coercive. Her postcolonial materialist
feminist position disrupts radical feminists’ abolitionist projects that construct sex
markets solely as harming women, as well as the sex work advocates’ position which
asserts sex workers’ agency. As a scholar of feminist legal theory, she is well situated
to envision outcomes of experimental approaches to law regulating sex markets, and
to offer nuanced theories of work and exploitation that acknowledge the diversity
among sex workers. This is especially important given that law has traditionally been
an arena where subjectivity for women can be formally established.
After an exhaustive genealogy of feminist perspectives on commodified sex in the
first part of her book, in part 2 Kotiswaran compares sex markets within and between
two Indian cities—provincial Tirupati in the Southeast and Sonagachi in Kolkata—
to reveal differing subjectivities relative to the scale, the various stakeholders and
the differing modes of sex work. In part 3 she employs a legal realist analysis to
hypothesize what partial decriminalization, complete decriminalization and legal-
ization would mean for a variety of sex workers, who range from debt-bonded to
independent. She shows that such legal approaches would collide with local practices
resulting in increased state control, further stigmatization of sex work, and increased
harms for women relative to their work setting. Ultimately she argues that redistribu-
tion of social justice is most likely to occur where legal code desists from assuming
sex work to be an exceptional, uniquely destructive kind of commodified labor, since
such a code’s unintended consequences penalize women.
In a sweeping analysis of the literature on prostitution, she examines positions held by
radical feminists (whose framework informs much sex work policy), work advocates,
what she’s called “middle-ground feminists,” materialist feminists, and postcolonial
feminists. The radical feminist’s violence position has shifted from solely analyz-
ing patriarchy to an analysis rooted in the macro-political-economy of nations en-
meshed in patriarchy as shaping the presence and scale of prostitution. Kathleen Barry
(1995) in her book, The Prostitution of Sexuality, links a country’s level of economic
Page 140 PoLAR: Vol. 35, No. 1

development (ranging from feudal to postindustrial) to manifestations of commer-

cialized sex (ranging from trafficking to normalization). Radical feminists see work
advocates as rooted in the normalization stage and the harm-reductionists as refram-
ing the issue around public health that only curbs unsafe sex rather than prostitution
itself. Sex work advocates, on the other hand, note that not all poor women enter
sex work and that the radical feminist perspective denies the agency of those women
who choose sex work over other ways of earning an income. Advocates challenge
the implication that women trafficked for sex aren’t actually migrating for labor and
bristle at the assumption that they’re always coerced as in Laura Agustı́n’s Sex at
the Margins. Middle-ground feminists steer between these positions by advocating a
pragmatic stance vis-à-vis regulations and thus call for an experimental approach to
commercial sex laws, including partial decriminalization or legalization. Rejecting
all of these stances for their unintended consequences, Kotiswaran desires a rework-
ing of the problem to promote a redistributional perspective on sex work that grants
women authority over their own lives, and laws that focus less on how women and
society are harmed by prostitution, and more on what women’s rights are.
To that end Kotiswaran draws on the materialist feminist capitalism analytic. This
literature moves from revolutionary Russian writings on marriage and prostitution,
to the paid housework debates in the West, to dependency and postcolonial theorists
who analyze women’s work in relation to both the local context and the international
division of labor. And while materialist feminists hardly support the work position,
they reject laws that criminalize sex work, recognizing that women are economic
subjects. Materialist feminists aver that sex can never be free of commodification,
given the infusion of basic institutions by capitalism, and so turn to examining the
value sex creates. From this comes the argument that women be recognized and
compensated for the work they do, a perspective that destabilizes the entrenched
caricatures of radical feminists and sex work advocates to promote both recognition
and redistribution for sex workers.
Sonagachi has been characterized as a pit of human degradation such that there is
no possibility for women’s agency to exist there. Kotiswaran’s fieldwork rectifies
this view, offering a highly detailed account of the variety of modes of sex work
there, as well as how it differs from sex work markets in Tirupati, a destination for
religious pilgrims. The author’s research included interviews with sex workers who
vary by work setting, scale and degree of independence, as well as brothel keepers,
landlords, touts, officials, and activist organizations. She was also involved with legal
endeavors undertaken by the National Network of Sex Workers. Her ethnographic
work might be disappointing to anthropologists who hope that such methods will
include an interpretation of the situation by the people experiencing it. She refers to
her fieldwork as sociolegal scholarship; it shouldn’t be confused with ethnography.
Her analysis lurches over the meanings women give their work and its place in their
lives, and instead mines her data in order to place women into etic-oriented niches. Of
course, this accomplishes her goal quite well, but the whole person is pixilated and
her analysis bears the consequences as when she hypothesizes about the ways law
changes would affect sex workers—her projections are constrained by that narrow
framing of the women.
May 2012 Page 141

In many instances the author fails to fully define her terms clearly, so I would not
recommend this book for most undergraduates. Legal scholars and social scientists
interested in law, women and work, and South Asian studies would benefit from her
analysis. And while policy makers should read the book, the language may keep them
from appreciating the message.

Brent Luvaas
Drexel University

Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the

Afterlife of Development
Daromir Rudnyckyj (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010)

Do anthropologists have anything interesting left to say about neoliberalism? After

a spate of books, articles, and papers in the early to mid-‘00s it would have seemed
like the answer is “no.” We have already written volumes about market logic and
rational self-management, applied the term to such a broad set of topics as to have
rendered it mundane, indeed cliché, its very utterance at conferences enough to elicit
a collective groan. In the last couple of years, however, in the wake of worldwide
recession and dynamic occupy movements, the discussion of neoliberalism has taken
on a renewed urgency, a sense that we have reached a critical threshold and require
new theoretical tools to push us in one direction or another. A new crop of scholars has
come along hoping to provide those tools and breathe new life into the discussion.
Daromir Rudnyckyj is one notable example. His 2010 book Spiritual Economies
interrogates the spread of neoliberalism, and its increasingly “ubiquitous practice”
of “economic calculation” (p. 21), into one of the most personal aspects of everyday
life, spirituality.
Following his mentor Aihwa Ong’s lead, Rudnyckyj treats neoliberalism in this work
as a set of “concrete,” though decidedly malleable, practices (p. 5), a global flexible
assemblage (p. 237) capable of melding with all sorts of seemingly incongruous cul-
tural formations. That, he implies, is what makes it so wily and so dangerous. Rather
than a monolithic ideology, epoch, or space (p. 19), neoliberalism adapts to local
conditions, becoming whatever it needs to be in order to promote the interests of the
market. This is not an entirely original formulation – Karl Marx said more or less the
same thing about plain, old-fashioned capitalism – but it is a useful one nonetheless.
It enables anthropologists to read all sorts of seemingly noneconomic phenomena
as neoliberal in sentiment, if not in content. The cultural formation that interests
Rudnyckyj, however, and which he makes the subject of his book, is the Islam-based
spiritual management training program, popular throughout contemporary Indonesia
known, as “Emotional and Spiritual Quotient,” or just ESQ. In Spiritual Economies,
Rudnyckyj deftly depicts the historical, political, and economic context out of which
ESQ emerges and provides detailed ethnographic description of its employment in
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one particular setting, the Krakatau Steel Factory in Banten, at the west end of
Java.
In Rudnyckyj’s work, there is no “clash of civilizations” between Islam and Western-
style capitalism. Islam, rather, is a method of disciplining the self thoroughly com-
patible with Indonesia’s transition towards democracy and free trade. Islam and
neoliberalism share an ethic “of individual accountability” (p. 146) and a penchant
for transforming work into a sense of personal duty (p. 141). Rudnyckyj quite con-
vincingly argues, in fact, that Islam has become to Indonesia something like what
Protestantism was to an earlier era in the United States and Europe, an ideological fuel
for economic development. Not surprisingly, then, Rudnyckyj draws heavily from
Max Weber in this book, along with the now canonical writings of Michel Foucault.
It is, on first glance, an odd theoretical pairing, and yet Rudnyckyj, in one of his
most significant theoretical contributions in this book, makes it seem so natural and
inevitable it is hard to understand why so few cultural theorists have made the link
before. Both, after all, “employed genealogical methods” (p. 11) in their analysis and
both saw the logic of capitalism as pertaining to domains far beyond economics.
Nonetheless, Rudnyckyj’s book, like much of the recent literature on neoliberalism,
risks overstepping its own bounds, painting such a broad picture of neoliberal values
and ideals as to once again beg the question as to whether the term actually enhances
our understanding or simply weighs it down, implanting ideas and concepts foreign
to whatever it is designed to elucidate. Rudnyckyj is careful to suggest that his own
understanding of ESQ often differs from that of his interlocutors. He identifies himself
as one practitioner of a larger project of “para-ethnography,” which, as he describes
it, seeks to “narrow the chasm between anthropological practice and the practices
that anthropology documents and analyzes” (p. 15). And yet, it is hard to argue that
Rudnyckyj’s perspective does not trump that of his interlocutors in this book. The
voices of workers at Krakatau Steel and organizers and participants in ESQ training
sessions are given ample space throughout the book, cited at length on a number of
occasions, but they are still ultimately disciplined by Rudnyckyj’s own theoretical
agenda, a commitment to critiquing neoliberalism and “its icy grip on our souls”
(p. 24) that often puts him flatly at odds with his interlocutors. In practice, then,
Rudnyckyj’s brand of para-ethnography reads as little different from the standard
variety of emic vs. etic analysis that has been the bread and butter of our discipline
since its earliest inceptions.
But don’t misunderstand me; Rudnyckyj manipulates the theoretical apparatus of
neoliberalism quite convincingly in this book, with ample – perhaps too ample –
ethnographic evidence to back up his assertions. Spiritual Economies is an excel-
lent piece of anthropological scholarship, with strong Indonesianist credentials and
a well-supported and widely applicable argument. That, however, is also my biggest
complaint about it. Despite its cutting-edge subject matter, this is a decidedly con-
ventional ethnography, a sober and lengthy cultural monograph based on a lone
ethnographer’s long-term fieldwork in a single location. The very things that make
this book good anthropology, that is, its meticulous attention to cultural and historical
specifics, its deep embedding in the larger literature on Indonesia, its commitment
May 2012 Page 143

to a single moment in space and time, threaten to render it irrelevant and unread-
able to other disciplines. It simply basks in the scholarly mode of anthropology,
leaving no applicable source uncited, no tangentially significant ethnographic detail
unmentioned. It becomes, in other words, quite a thing to sift through.
Rudnyckyj’s book is a solid, well-researched example of classic ethnography applied
to contemporary subject matter. In its best chapters, especially “Developing Faith,”
it is richly evocative and compelling to read. But in other places it lags, or rather
bogs down, with unnecessary references and gratuitous details. In the final analysis, it
succeeds in the tasks it sets out for itself, providing a strong case study of neoliberalism
in action, and it leaves me, at least, grudgingly convinced that neoliberalism is a
theoretical device with some life left in it after all.

JoAnn Martin
Earlham College

In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics

of History in Yucatán
Paul K. Eiss. (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010)

In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community and Politics of History in Yucatán

illuminates the creation of the archive as a packaging of history that can be deftly
unpackaged and repackaged to tell the tale of conflicts based on race, community,
class, and ethnicity. The unpacked archives reveal a history of violent and bloody
encounters through which the notion of el pueblo emerges on the terrain of confronta-
tions with hacendados, the Mexican state, and global capitalism, the latter shaped by
the logic of neoliberalism. The connecting thread that links the events narrated in this
book can be found in the circulation of dispossession and repossession, out of which
“el pueblo” takes hold as what Eiss describes as a grounded, yet transcendent entity
(p. 374).
After an introduction to the region, the book opens with the 1857 pronouncement of
guilt against an indigenous cacique, Pascual Chac, for having led a group composed
of indigenous and mestizo workers into woods claimed by Juana Peña, owner of the
hacienda, Tacubaya. In his defense, Pascual Chac claims that the lands over which
Juana Peña asserted her ownership were properly the lands of the community.
The significance of this opening narrative unfolds as Eiss disentangles the case,
addressing historical changes consigned to its margins, in particular, the steady en-
croachment of the haciendas and the resulting enslavement of the indigenous popu-
lation that took place in the 1850s. Thus, Eiss emphasizes dispossession, rather than
territorial possession, as the ground for the transcendent sense of “el pueblo.”
Eiss traces Hunucmá’s multiple forms of dispossession, beginning with the narrative
of dispossession by hacendados and culminating with dispossession of labor, rights,
Page 144 PoLAR: Vol. 35, No. 1

and dignity by global capitalism. But several themes crosscut the temporality of this
historical narrative. The woods, into which Pascual Chac led his group in September
1856, remain a key figure in the fight for repossession. Chac’s declaration that the
lands were “el común” (p. 42), drew upon a legal framework that blended Spanish,
indigenous, and liberal understandings of common land. The Spanish contribution to
the notion of “el común” included the idea that the size of the commons was linked
not only to the prior use but also to the needs of the community as affected by the size
and subsistence requirements of the population. As the book unfolds, this broader
sense of “el común” links dispossession of land to the more general welfare of the
pueblo, rendering attacks on “el común” as an injustice against the pueblo’s right to
survive. More than merely territory, “el común” emerges as a guarantee of social and
moral standards. This sense of the fullness of “el comun” underwrites the calls for
justice issued in the name of “el pueblo.”
The woodland through which Chac led his followers reappears in various guises
throughout Eiss’s history of Hunucmá. The woodlands become the place to which
those escaping labor on the haciendas retreat. It is also the refuge from which those
who are dispossessed execute bloody reprisals on hacendados. In the discourse of the
economic and political elites, “el común” is populated with lawless and bloodthirsty
wanderers who escape “civilization” to carry out “barbarous sacrifices” (p. 88). This
same theme is repeated toward the end of the book. When residents of Tetiz return to
the woodlands in the 1990s to hunt deer, they do so as an act of lawlessness, for deer
are a protected species in Yucatán.
The illegal deer hunt traverses the span of Tetiz’s history; literally crossing lands
marked by that history, while the proceeds from the hunt, the illegal venison, command
high prices in the marketplace. Yet the money from the illegal sale finances the food
and drink for the fiesta to honor the Virgin of Tetiz, a figure whose history dates to
the 1730’s. 1730 marks the date when the Virgin, disguised as a poor women, travels
to Spain to beg alms from a Franciscan Friar to rescue her and her son from poverty.
Fray Francisco gives the woman a single Spanish coin and only much later, when he
travels to Yucatán, does he realize that the woman was the Virgin. Eiss’s narrative
appears to come full circle in this chapter in which the interactions between Spain
and its colonies are recalled in the image of the Virgin of Tetiz who, to be properly
honored, requires the transformations of money into commodity into money through
the illegal exchanges of the deer hunt.
Read as a chronological narrative, Eiss’s book captures the depth of dispossession.
The loss of land is facilitated by techniques of measurement that render obsolete
the memories and voices of “el pueblo.” The establishment of ejidos constitutes the
labor of el pueblo as belonging to the State. Finally, multinational capital renders “el
pueblo” an impoverished work force. In the shadows of this history of dispossession
“el pueblo” emerges. It takes form out of the loss of land, life, livelihoods, dignity,
power, and respect. “El pueblo” appears in the hope that takes shape when the people
who endure constant dispossession begin to dream of repossession (p. 275).
In a world of multisited, global ethnographies Eiss’s book reminds us of the value of
deeply historical and ethnographic framings of the present. Enriched by contemporary
May 2012 Page 145

social theory, In the Name of El Pueblo draws on the margins of the archive and the
plurality and variety of forms of archives. Its recognition of dispossession rather
than possession as a ground for “el pueblo,” reminds readers that the most important
forces in social life may not be found only in what appears to be fully present. For
readers who have worked on similar issues in Mexico, this book beautifully captures
the grounded and yet ephemeral sense of el pueblo.

Guillermina Gina Núñez-Mchiri

University of Texas – El Paso

The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the

Nation
Leo R. Chavez (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008)

Leo R. Chavez’ The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Na-
tion offers a well-supported and vital counternarrative to the national anti-immigrant
discourse portrayed in the media nationally and abroad. Chavez is a cultural anthro-
pologist, prominently known for his classic ethnography Shadowed Lives, his schol-
arship on Latina fertility and reproduction, and for his cultural critiques of media
depictions of Mexican immigration in the United States. His work has helped frame
national and international discourses on immigration, globalization, and transnation-
alism, as well as contemporary debates about Mexican immigration over the past
three decades. In The Latino Threat, Chavez provides a critical discussion about the
images, stereotypes, and hegemonic “truths” reproduced in our society through the
crafting and recycling of myths created by media pundits, politicians, and individuals
who openly disregard immigrants of Latin American descent.
Chavez analyzes how citizenship has been discussed through legal classifications,
as an identity and solidarity marker, and via social and political participation. He
argues that “critiquing discourse is not enough,” (p. 15) and offers empirical research
as a tool for disarticulating the myths-turned-into-reality that have infiltrated psy-
ches, perceptions, lived experiences and multiple identities in the United States. His
work involves mixed-methods, weaving qualitative narratives in his case studies, and
quantitative analysis generated from survey data. He also provides a sample of visual
images that include cartoons, pictures, and print media depicting how Latina/os are
represented in the American mainstream.
In his expository analysis of notions of citizenship, Leo Chavez contests the Latino
Threat narrative, which posits that Latinos are like no other immigrants for their
unwillingness or incapability of integrating into the United States. He critiques those
who have generated fears of a Mexican conquest and invasion by invoking immigra-
tion, Latina fertility, and reproduction. Although Mexicans have been the primary
focus of this public discourse, Chavez indicates that this discourse also tacitly in-
cludes people from Latin America in general, as well as U.S.-born Americans of
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Latin American descent. He concedes that Latinos are different from past immi-
grants, primarily because they have been part of the United States since the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, “predating the settlement of the British
colonies” (p. 3). The key factor distinguishing Mexican immigrants from other im-
migrant groups, according to Chavez, is their characterization as “illegal aliens,” a
social identity marker laden with connotations of illegitimacy and criminality that
render immigrants as undeserving of societal benefits, including citizenship.
The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation is organized
in seven chapters; the first four chapters address how myths and stereotypes about
Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Latinos have historically developed in the United
States. The second part of his book examines how media spectacles have contributed
to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that disembodies, dehumanizes, and criminalizes im-
migrants. Chavez examines contemporary media stories and images of immigra-
tion, organ transplant issues, the Minutemen presence in Arizona, and the immigrant
marches of 2006. Although the topics he discusses in his work might seem disjointed,
they are clearly linked to his critique of “alarmist” responses towards immigrants as
“threats” to the nation. Chavez contends that socio-political and media representa-
tions have historically led to antagonistic attitudes, actions, and policies contributing
to anti-immigrant legislation, internments, and acrimonious debates on citizenship
rights. He points to key moments in U.S. history in which previous “threats” to the
nation were associated with other languages, religions, and waves of immigration
from other nations. For example, Chavez indicates how the discourse of “threat” have
been previously used in the United States to target specific groups of immigrants
(such as Germans, Catholics, Chinese, Japanese, southern and eastern Europeans).
The Latino Threat makes valuable contributions to current and future debates about
citizenship and immigration issues that merit mention. First, Chavez discusses the
string of historical and political strategies that have contributed to the racialization of
Mexicans and other immigrant groups and the development of national hierarchies
in the United States. He traces how people of Mexican ancestry were legally defined
as “white” at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War with the signing of the 1848 Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Yet in spite of legal definitions, Mexicans were considered
“non-white” in the public imagination because of their national origin. Chavez points
out that Mexicans and Asians have been considered “permanently foreign” because
of the “illegal alien” label and Jim Crow segregation policies. Contemporary immi-
gration policies, such as the 1996 immigration law, have made it more difficult for
immigrants to become residents, to access social services, and to become more easily
deportable. Post-9/11 legislation has further criminalized and penalized Mexican im-
migrants as “enemies” of the state, and has justified the increased militarization of the
U.S.-Mexico border. Second, Chavez provides a sophisticated analysis of Latina fer-
tility, reproduction, and social integration. His work comparing Latina and white
women’s fertility rates points to generational and educational differences, as well as
the impacts of industrialization and capitalism. Finally, Chavez documents the effects
of the 2006 immigrant marches as visual representations of the power of immigrants
and their supporters to garner national attention. Chavez refers to these marches as
May 2012 Page 147

“public performances” of citizenship that yielded meaningful symbols and images

for those who participated and witnessed the marches through various media outlets.
For scholars, citizens, and noncitizens alike, understanding how taken for granted
assumptions or putative truths about Latin American, and Mexican immigrants and
their offspring are made, reproduced, and spread offers insights to the contradictions
of immigration, citizenship, and nation-state building. As Chavez indicates “looking
at who we ban from entry, or for whom we create obstacles to integration into
society . . . also reveals how we imagine ourselves as a nation—that is, as a group of
people with intertwined destinies despite our differences” (p. 9). This work provides
critical insights, philosophical debates, as well as empirical evidence that offer ways
in which to disassemble and reassemble how scholars, the media, and the public
conceive of citizens and noncitizens within the nation-states, as well as global and
transnational contexts.

Gwen Ottinger
University of Washington-Bothell

Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia

Edward Snaider (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008)

Nature Protests begins with a puzzle: The ecology movement in Slovakia, author
Edward Snajdr tells us, was an important, even decisive, force in bringing down
Czechoslovakia’s communist regime. But in postsocialist Slovakia, it had little in-
fluence; green parties played a relatively minor role in the government and were
even vilified for some of their activities. What happened to the ecology movement
in the transition? Snadjr’s book accounts for both the success and demise of ecology
in Slovakia by situating it in its larger discursive contexts. Ecological messages, he
argues, were successful only to the extent that they resonated with shifting cultural
identities and other powerful political discourses—a conclusion that has relevance
for the study of environmental politics far beyond eastern Europe.
In the first chapters of Nature Protests, Snajdr shows how the ecology movement
was able to flourish even under Czechoslovakia’s repressive communist regime.
Devoted first and foremost to the restoration of drevenice, wooden cabins scattered
throughout the countryside, volunteer conservationists were seen as little threat to the
state; their activities harmless, if incomprehensible, in the context of the communists’
instrumentalist approach to nature. But the voluntary societies that formed around
the drevenice became a site for critical discourse about the state and its failure to
maintain a healthy environment for its citizens—one of the only such sites available
to Slovaks. With the publication of an extensively researched report on the state
of the environment in Bratislava, Snajdr argues, the ecology movement became a
voice for Slovaks suffering from the crowding, pollution, and decay of the capital
city. Appealing broadly to citizens frustrated with a degraded environment and poor
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quality of life, it ultimately led to the opposition movement that brought down the
communist government.
The second half of the book portrays the ecology movement’s struggle to carve out a
place for itself in the radically altered political landscape of postcommunist Slovakia.
After the fall of the communist regime, nationalism came to dominate Slovakian
politics and, Snajdr shows, ecology movement leaders failed to translate their focus on
practical concerns about environmental decline into terms legible in the new politics
of ethnic identity. The transformation of green organizations themselves compounded
the problem: as the group that had been so influential in challenging the communist
regime became increasingly professionalized, organizations led by younger activists
unapologetically affiliated themselves with international environmental NGOs. Both
developments left green parties disconnected from the kind of grassroots support
that had made the earlier ecology movement so influential. The volunteer ecological
restoration projects from which the movement stemmed continued, but while a few
retained at their core values for nature and sustainable living, others have been
reinterpreted as projects of nation-building, re-creating monuments to “authentic”
cultural identity in the Slovakian countryside.
Throughout the book, Snajdr draws attention to the shifting “environmentalities”
represented in the Slovakian case; that is, the various ways in which people in-
teract with institutions, knowledge systems, and power regimes in conceptualizing
nature and the environment. Yet this theoretical apparatus is less compelling than his
straightforward ethnographic analysis of the changing political climate in Slovakia,
the dominant concerns of citizens, and the ways that the ecology movement’s goals,
strategies, and messages came to have meaning—or not—for a people preoccupied
with how to get along under communist rule and how to forge a new nation after it
ended. Snajdr shows that the success of the ecology movement hinged on its ability
to make environmental concerns discursively central to, and in line with, other kinds
of desires and discontents. In doing so, his study points to the resonance between
environmental and other cultural and political discourses as a potentially important
factor in accounting for the success or failure of environmental movements in any
national context, making the book a contribution not only to the understanding of
post-communist transitions but of environmental politics worldwide.

Hoon Song
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the

United States
Carol Greenhouse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)

Carol Greenhouse’s much-anticipated book is as yet the best answer to the quandary
that must have been quietly hounding a good many anthropologists of late: how, and
May 2012 Page 149

since when, did “ethnography” become our saving grace for institutional posturing.
At least, as seen from where I write, employed by a large, public institution, “ethnog-
raphy” has become our purchase, a prized possession in the fight for the discipline’s
delicate institutional life. Greenhouse takes the concerned reader back to the flour-
ishing scene of the 1990s ethnographies of the U.S. cities. Anthropologists were
returning “home” in hoards then, partially in response to the mainstreaming of the
neoliberal centrist politics, whose fighting words deployed “culture” as a marker of
racial and ethnic stereotyping. The returning anthropologists responded to this politi-
cal climate in the best way known to their profession: ethnographically documenting
the specificities of (largely ethnic) communities in order to correct the “essentializing”
political discourse (p. 15). Writing ethnography was deemed a political act (p. 121).
Ethnography became the lingua franca of the discipline’s claim to relevance (p. 65).
Greenhouse sharply reminds us, however, that this turn to ethnography was in lieu
of actual political participation (p. 60). The anti-essentialist impulse to amend the
semantics of political language amounted to nothing more than a sophisticated plain-
tiff plea for more tolerance. The claimant ethnography constituted the “local” as a
counter-example that exposed the broken promises of law (p. 225). Anthropologists
were thus able to question the fairness in the access to the federal governance, but de-
clined to question the existence of federal governance. The claimant ethnographies, in
other words, presupposed precisely those categories for whose terms political strug-
gles were waged. The local was immediately federal-local or global-local, parts in a
whole. Mere sampling of a given whole, the “relevance” imagined that way remained
allegorical (p. 109). A form of plea with the presumably-existing good conscience of
the national audience, the claimant ethnography sounded ironical (p. 172).
My only reservation with Geenhouse’s brilliant analysis of what went wrong in the
1990s ethnography is that it is too devastating. She leaves little room for anything
positive left to do for ethnography, aside from directly enlisting itself to political
debates. The 20/20 hindsight’s inclination towards unsparing devastation is much
discussed among intellectual historians. Michel de Certeau indicates in The Writing
of History (1988) that this inclination has to do with our tendency to mystify the
“place” from where we write history. For it is hard to write while not obscuring
the fact that the writer is also “situated in history” (p. 20). The task is entangled
in the paradox of “situating present in time” (p. 91). Without much vigilance, he
continues, we are bound to assume a “non-place” – a “zero point” of time – from
where our narrative ensues. Vigilance begins with an awareness that writing is a kind
of practice, and practice, writing. It is both a representational “construction” and a
participation in something given. This is also to say that there is no “zero point”
from where the writer can make out a pure construction from a pure given. In a way,
such is partially the lesson of Greenhouse’s “paradox of relevance”: what the 1990s
ethnographers were writing was already “written” in the political arena of practice;
what they thought was an essentialized referent was already a sign. The question is
whether Greenhouse applies this rigorous test of practice to her own writing.
She does indeed, but inconsistently. Unguarded contrasts between “construction”
and the “given” are most overt in the final chapter, titled “empirical citizenship.” The
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chapter opens thus: “before scholars talked about ‘identity,’ there was not one word
but many other words: race, class, sex . . . ethnicity, culture . . . ” (p. 256). “Identity”
for her culminates the “equivalencing” part-whole construction (p. 46). In contrast,
she argues, the “individualist,” as captured by Alexis Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt,
is more than what s/he is as referenced by globalizing terms such as the nation-state.
For the individualists, the “need for citizenship stems from . . . their personal sense
of responsibility and dignity in their relation with other people” (p. 262). In this
sense, she adds, “an individualist is always simultaneously inside and outside the
community” (p. 265). Then, the chapter trails off, leaving the reader guessing: is she
endorsing the “empirical citizenship” in all its “individualist” complexity?
If she does, she comes close to “fetishism,” which is Karl Marx’s critique of the cri-
tique of constructivism. His Capital (1990[1976]) was written in reaction to classical
political economists, who were champion anticonstructivist critiques of capitalism of
the time. For Marx, they were still victims of commodity fetishism insofar as they un-
derstood capitalism’s trick as limited to passing a pure construction (the “equivalent”
form of value) as something real (“use-value”) – whose culminating prey would be the
money hoarder. It is because, for Marx, at no point, not even to political economists,
does the equivalent value look like something “made up” by a mere convention. For
the equivalent form expresses itself only in the guise of the “physical form” of another
commodity’s (seeming) “use-value” (p. 159) – which, in turn, stems from the fact
that under capitalism a use-value becomes what it is only for the other’s need.
Consider Marx’s application of this logic of fetishistic perception to humans: “Peter
only relates to himself as a man through his relation to another man, Paul, in whom he
recognizes his likeness. With this, however, Paul also becomes from head to toe, in his
physical form as Paul, the form of appearance of the species man for Peter” (p. 144). In
short, the equivalent form of the “species man” cannot be directly expressed, but only
in the physical differential between the empirical persons, Peter and Paul. This, for
Marx, is how what is a mere convention acquires its magical persuasive power, that is,
through this irreducible materiality. If this illusion is merely that of money hoarders –
who confuse convention with the real thing – no one will fall for it. In a way, the
1990s ethnographers come across as money hoarders in Greenhouse’s critique.

Susan J. Terrio
Georgetown University

Casualties of Care. Immigration and the Politics of

Humanitarianism in France
Miriam Ticktin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)

In this important book, Miriam Ticktin builds on extensive historical and ethno-
graphic research in field sites that include NGOs, state medical offices, and
refugee appeals boards to study the politics of care and humanitarianism that affect
May 2012 Page 151

undocumented immigrants in contemporary France. This is a theoretically sophisti-

cated and provocative account of what happens when the moral imperative to address
suffering in the form of serious illness and gendered violence becomes part of state
law and public policy. The heart of the book is her analysis of the exceptional pro-
vision of a 1998 French immigration law that provided temporary legal status and
medical treatment to undocumented immigrants who had life-threatening illnesses.
Ticktin begins the book by asking how state officials determine the legitimate forms
of suffering that will earn the right to legal residency papers. Does the state definition
of pathology correspond to a bio-medical logic that demands an objective assessment
of who is truly ill or are there gaps in the humanitarian exception that have unintended
consequences for those who suffer? What are the implications for society when a sick
body is a valuable social resource only as long as it remains in the grip of disease?
What political calculus informs the decision to permit the sick to live in France free
from the threat of deportation but not to obtain legal work there? Is there overlap
in the regimes of care intended for those who suffer from serious illness and those
who experience sexual violence? Ticktin’s unique contribution to an anthropology of
asylum, immigration, and human rights in postcolonial France is to ask and answer
these critical questions.
In the political context of the late 1990s, marked by increasingly restrictive im-
migration laws, decreased tolerance for economic migrants, and heightened fears
surrounding fraudulent asylum petitions, the “best” position for someone without pa-
pers was to be gravely ill because the 1998 illness clause was one of the few options
available for obtaining legal status in France. Ticktin documents the history, imple-
mentation, and discursive formations surrounding this humanitarian exception. She
examines the increasing skepticism shown by state officials as the number of cases
for illness permits skyrocketed from 1,500 in 1999 to 36,008 in 2004 (p. 92). Her
rich ethnographic material shows how state officials—including doctors, nurses and
social workers—struggled to reconcile their politics and their morals in determining
what claims were legitimate, on the one hand, with the standards of accountability
and credibility required for the administration of state immigration policy, on the
other. As illness permits became harder to get and keep, she records the unintended
consequences produced by the law. Without the possibility to work legally, immi-
grants were forced to work in exploitative and underpaid jobs in the underground
economy to survive. To remain legal, some chose not to continue treatment, others
infected themselves with the HIV virus, and, in one case, a healthy man stole the
identity of a friend who died of AIDS and began to take his medication (p. 198).
Ticktin makes strategic use of Agamben’s concept of “bare life” but melds it in
interesting ways with postcolonial feminist theory to study the emergence of the
suffering body in specific contexts as well as its association with a specific category
of persons. She argues that in the last decades of the 20th century humanitarianism
responded most urgently to the “recognizably gendered, racialized and sexualized
bodies of women and girls from the global South” (p. 18). As state officials became
less tolerant of illness claims they were more receptive to the burgeoning global
problem of violence against women. The victim of gender-based violence began
to replace the sick body in its ability to elicit compassion. She explores the crises
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experienced by Maghrebi women who, despite living in France, were subject to

the family codes of their countries of origin. Here readers see examples of the
vulnerability of women who could be repudiated by their husbands and risk losing
their legal status, the custody of their children, and their right to work.
In that context the suffering body deemed worthy of legal recognition was understood
to be universal-outside of time, space, and politics. French law granted an exception
for victims whose condition exemplified innocent suffering and earned them moral
legitimacy. This view emerges clearly in her discussion of the fight against hu-
man trafficking spearheaded by the professional organization, the Comité Contre
l’Esclavage Moderne (CCEM). Significant resources were made available to rescue
modern slaves, particularly when the victims were young girls who were described as
defenseless, lost, and sexually innocent (p. 169). Those who demonstrated too much
independence in leaving home to seek a better life were suspect. This well-funded
human rights association focused on the rescue of sex slaves, not on the protection
of undocumented workers, although many of the sans-papiers qualified as slaves ac-
cording to the CCEM’s own criteria. Ticktin argues that this new distinction between
slaves and the undocumented illustrates the slippery terrain between the legal and
illegal, between sympathetic victims and stigmatized others.
Finally, Ticktin ends the book with a thoughtful discussion of the norms surrounding
bodily health and human dignity. She argues that for the poor migrants from former
French colonies who represented 80% of the claimants for illness permits, biology
is not a fixed substance but the only resource available to them (p. 210). They trade
biological life for legal recognition; the imminent threat of death is what ensures
a social life (215). Ticktin admonishes readers to revisit our preoccupation with
emergency and short-term interventions in responding to global crises. Although
necessary, these crisis interventions obscure the chronic conditions that result from
structural inequalities between the global South and North and that demand long-term
political action. This is a book that should be required reading for academics, policy
makers, and activists.

M. Gabriela Torres
Wheaton College, MA

Anthropologies at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence

Jennifer R. Weis and Hilary J. Haldane, eds. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2011)

Jennifer Weis and Hilary Haldane present a geographically diverse collection of

articles that dissect the political context within which responses to gender-based
violence take place. Primarily focusing on the provision of services for victims
of gender-based violence, the authors complicate the ways that violence itself is
understood as a public problem. Anthropologies at the Front Lines of Gender-Based
May 2012 Page 153

Violence underscores that cultures and structural inequalities actively shape they
ways that gender-based violence is defined and approached through their research
with different kinds of “front line” workers—including police officers, emergency
service providers, shelter administrators, psychologists, and support group organizers.
The authors focus on actions and interactions of caregivers, institutions, funders and
states, challenging the reader to move away from locating gender based-violence in
the interpersonal realm. Instead, the editors write that gender-based violence is best
located within the political economy of its production (p. 3).
One of the key issues raised by Weis and Haldane and a number of their contrib-
utors is how anthropologists, disciplined to be deeply invested in cultural relativity
(p. 5), can respond to gender-based violence as scholars (p. 31). Brommer presents a
spectacularly successful account of how anthropologists and activists collaborate by
using knowledge gained from cultural immersion to visibly improve the quality of
life of entire communities. In Brommer’s account, women’s empowerment is attained
by community groups through the reproduction of South Asian familial dynamics
in immigrant communities in Silicone Valley. Replacing the extended families left
behind by immigrants, women’s empowerment groups were able to support strongly
held notions of South Asians as an ideal model minority. According to the author,
prior efforts to support victims of violence were hampered because South Asian
immigrants, hesitant to tarnish their image, actively rejected the idea of the abused
woman existing in their midst (p. 62). Narika and Maitri, the two organizations stud-
ied by Brommer, reconstructed the family support system lacking in the immigrant
contexts. The simulation of family support systems built community and provided
tangible and culturally appropriate and acceptable supports for women in situations
of domestic abuse (p. 65).
All the contributors believe it is of paramount importance to respond to the variable
needs of those impacted by gender-based violence. Yet for most authors, activism and
scholarship become highly particularized and thorny because of the thick knowledge
gained through participant observation and cultural immersion. Cultures, institutions,
individuals and their analyst intermingle to know and challenge gender-based violence
in intricate ways.
Babior and Bargach give evidence of the activism and knowledge that can be gained
from embedded fieldwork within women’s shelters in Tokyo and Morocco respec-
tively. Both shelters sought to support women struggling with domestic violence,
but the culturally appropriate ways to serve every client was not easily determined
(p. 36). Supporting violence survivors was fraught with uneasiness for ethnographers.
The difficulties for ethnographers were a result of the volatile mix of institutional
practices, funding gaps, the human trafficking markets, the psychological state of
particular shelter residents, and the deep isolation felt by the ethnographers (p. 221).
Much of Weis and Haldane’s volume is organized around the different dimensions
of the uneasiness of challenging gender-based violence in cross-cultural contexts.
Collins and Alcalde look at how prevailing cultural understandings of the nature
of domestic violence and its victims can shape the access women have to services
and forms of redress that are made available. Kwiatkowski and Shively both provide
Page 154 PoLAR: Vol. 35, No. 1

nuanced interpretations of how global notions of domestic violence, victimhood, and

appropriate forms of humanitarian and legal redress are transplanted, appropriated,
and translated (p. 71). Shively highlights the importance of kinship structures to the
enactment of domestic violence in Turkey. Extended families often worked together
to control and violate women, thus disrupting western models of intimate partner vio-
lence. Kwiatkowski’s analysis of internationally funded battered women’s programs
in Vietnam demonstrates how the local practice of international initiatives can be
easily co-opted into national cultural agendas. While foreign NGOs emphasized the
woman’s choice to leave an abusive home, national reconciliation committees came
to use foreign-funded initiatives to compel women to sustain marriages (p. 149).
The transnational response to wife battering in Kwiatkowski’s analysis is actively
hampered by a well-organized national cultural agenda.
Other authors also unravels the negotiation through which gender-based violence
comes to be constituted as a salient national political problem—in Hemment’s analy-
sis of civil society in Russia, Leach’s account of the ways that violence against women
in Canada is remembered and Richter’s analysis of gender inequities in the disaster
response after Hurricane Katrina. Working to define gender-based violence on the
national Russian stage was framed in opposition to local ways of knowing violence
against women because of the contradictions in NGO funding priorities, fissures in
feminisms, and deeply entrenched transnational civic development agendas. Hemmet
recounts how local activists reject transnational campaigns that primitivize Russian
culture by understanding violence against women as a consequence of economic
hardship (p. 185).
National imaginaries intersect in responses to gender based violence in a number of
ways. Leach analyzes how the Canadian state’s successful self-depiction of itself as
innately fair, progressive, and inclusive can act to obscure the experience of marginal-
ized citizens. The state’s very funding of women’s shelters works exceptionally well
to silence women’s rights activists. Activists working in state sponsored institutions
fear that the survival of services they provide depends on not challenging the politics
and image of its primary funder: the state (p. 205). Richter recounts how the gender
inequities in the ideologies US emergency preparedness planners resulted in gender
discrimination in the face of Hurricane Katrina (p. 25). A natural disaster lay bare
the lack of attention that disaster planners had paid to women’s basic health issues—
an oversight that left survivors open to sexual abuse in shelters and without basic
materials to deal with personal hygiene.
Countering gender-based violence within the bounds of anthropology is distinctly
problematic. As anthropologists we pride ourselves on tracing the logics of our
subjects’ emic positions and suspending our own ethnocentric judgments. One of the
most important contributions that Anthropologies at the Front Lines of Gender-Based
Violence makes is the demonstration that countering violence cross-culturally is as
infinitely possible as it is imperfect. Framing the analysis of gender-based violence
service provision within the public life of states, the contributors remind us that
struggling to respond to violence is not just desirable but also inevitable.