Opaque encounters: Leaving the strange strange in ethnographic field photography

Madeline Otis Campbell’s Interpreters of Occupation provides an intimate account of the United States’ gendered and imperialist practices in the Middle East. Her narrative revolves around the experiences of ten mostly young, university-educated, English-speaking Iraqi women and men hired as interpreters for the US occupation forces. As violence escalated in Iraq, interpreters’ role as conduits of US power in the region put their lives in danger, leading them to seek asylum in the United States. It is through Campbell’s temporary contract working for the US refugee admissions program that she first meets her interlocutors. Deploying a multisited methodology, initially traveling to Iraq to meet asylum claimants and then maintaining contact with them once they resettled in New England, Campbell traces their processes of subjectivation and resubjectivation across several boundaries—first inside and outside US bases in Iraq and then between the state borders of the United States and Iraq. Exploring how interpreters negotiate a compromising set of positions—as both Iraqi nationals and employees of the US army—Campbell thinks of the interpreters’ subjectivities as sites where the configuration of their “gendered agency” (cf. Mahler and Pessar 2001, 200) can be observed. In her analysis, Iraqi interpreters’ labor of translation also constitutes an exercise in subject formation (61) that emerges out of the encounter between the interpellations of US power structures and their strategic renderings of Iraqi culture.One of the book’s greatest strengths is its success at describing the convergences between US imperial feminist traditions and the dominant gendered models of a “war generation” (27–36) of Iraqis preoccupied with male protection of women. The first chapter succinctly and effectively describes the generational contingency and fluidity of dominant Iraqi gendered roles through time, as well as their coconstitution with larger colonial, nationalist, and imperialist projects in the region. The chapters that follow depict Iraqi interpreters’ reckoning with the mistranslation of these fluid and historically situated gendered social relations into rigid and orientalist representations of Iraqi gender roles, both under US occupation (chaps. 3 and 4) and within the United States’ employment, legal, and bureaucratic practices (chaps. 5 and 6).Even though the narrative engages with more male than female interlocutors (three women and seven men), Interpreters of Occupation provides close consideration of the contrasting experiences of Iraqi male and female interpreters. Illuminating how the patriarchal logics of US imperialism permeate Iraqi women’s lives, the third chapter provides a nuanced description of the double bind that Iraqi female interpreters face while working on US military bases. Specifically, Campbell shows how Iraqi women employed by US occupation forces are caught between either assuming the role of “liberated women”—a subject position ironically inhabited by becoming agreeable or indifferent to male harassment—or adopting the subject position of “a good Iraqi girl”: actively rejecting undesired sexual advancements yet risking becoming ostracized, even demonized, as a potential threat to security. Then, focusing on the experience of male interpreters, chapter 4 argues that the “hyperpatriarchy” (37) of a postoccupation Iraq allows for a sense of fraternity between American and Iraqi men that enables male interpreters to forge “cultural forms of belonging” (173–77) within and between Iraq and the United States that are inaccessible to their female counterparts. Moreover, in describing men’s reckoning with their inability to live up to a masculine “responsibility to protect” (114–55), especially vis-à-vis the families they left behind in Iraq, the author exposes the internal contradictions of this hyperpatriarchy, as experienced by interpreters in navigating the material conditions of their transnational becoming.The author presents the fact that Iraqi female interpreters tend to consider their residence in the United States more permanent than male interpreters consider theirs as evidence against a common assumption in migration and transnational gender studies that women are generally more tied to “home” than men (203). However, departing from a perspective that understands the links between “women” and “home” as performative rather than constitutive, Campbell’s interlocutors’ stories could also be seen to confirm this familiar observation. Anecdotes of Iraqi female interpreters’ inability to forge a sense of cultural belonging in the United States, as opposed to their male counterparts’ capacity to occupy the identity of “hyphenated Americans” (208), along with men’s preoccupation with female interpreters’ exercise of their sexuality as a marker of Iraq’s reputation (89–92) bespeak strong associations between “woman,” “home,” “nation,” and “tradition” in this transnational context. The fact that female interpreters find it harder to imagine returning to Iraq could be seen as a testament to the higher scrutiny to which these symbolic associations subject women.This book’s rich ethnographic material raises tantalizing questions beyond the scope of its argumentative arc. For instance, Campbell observes suspicion and social dispersion among her interlocutors that would seem to signal contemporary expressions of divisive colonial practices in the region. Overall, her emphasis on the subject formation of the interpreters—although successful in allowing for the continuous destabilization of gendered dichotomies and stagnant ideas of culture—forecloses an interpretative strategy that would reveal something more general about the spatial structuring and restructuring of imperial power in the contemporary Middle East through the gendered management of social relations across different boundaries.The author’s visibility throughout the ethnographic description is a salutary methodological choice and the description of her role “as a checkpoint of sorts” (4) is cogent, even if the implications of this observation could have been carried farther, perhaps enabling a metalevel discussion regarding the practice of social science itself. There is a striking resemblance between the lifeworld of the Iraqi interpreters of the US occupation described by Campbell and that of the ethnographic researcher who, more often than not, is engaged in efforts of translation and, indeed, of interpretation between the languages and “cultures” of social groups with asymmetrical power. In this sense, Interpreters of Occupation invites stimulating conversations regarding our own uncomfortable—if potentially productive—positioning as researchers, often situated betwixt and between larger imperial enterprises.This book is a great resource for graduate and undergraduate courses on refugees, gender, migration, and transnationalism, with valuable insights for scholars investigating contemporary modes of international intervention and gendered imperialist practices in the Middle East more broadly.

Japan 2007, is not the same country it was during theeighties, when foreigners flocked to Tokyo, armed with copies of books such as How to Succeed in Japan: A Business Etiquette Primer. Globalization, fueled by the Internet and other advances in communications technology, is playing an ever greater role in business operations around the globe. Outside of business, these advances allow people on opposite sides of the globe to interact, and this interaction exposes others to new ideas, views, languages, and cultures. This study evaluates the shifts in the corporate cultures of Japan and the United States, through the framework of Hofstedes value dimensions over the past 25 years, through the use of surveys and interviews in both countries. This rich material is backed by examples of these shifts in both countries; in addition to a brief overview of the communicative differences of Japan and the United States. This study will allow not only business professionals and managers, but also students and teachers, to approach another culture with clear, current insight that gets past stereotypes to help foster success in engaging and working with counterparts in other parts of the world.

After a review and brief history of the Arab American community, a detailed overview of the research and writings done on Arabs in the United States is presented, which includes references to two early Arab arrivals to the United States: Estevanico and Hadj Ali (Hi Jolly). These two pioneers are mostly ignored by the Arab American community (as well as researchers on that community) but should be embraced and celebrated. An assessment of the writings on Arab Americans finds that few books and dissertations were written before the 1970s when a surge in interest in this topic became obvious. The concluding section includes sixteen observations and recommendations. Among these is the fact that there has been hardly any research done on the rich materials available in the early Arab American press, as both the Arab American community and researchers on this community have focussed on the present, almost completely ignoring the past and/or possible future planning. This has resulted in the undermining of the main goal of Arabs in the United States to feel and to be viewed as full members of American society and body politic.

Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles by Laura Pulido. Race, Radical Activism, and the Third World Left

Book Reviews

387 Ab Imperio, 1/2011 Irena VLADIMIRSKY История икультура российского и восточноевропейского еврейства: Новые источники, новые подходы. Материалы международной науч- ной конференции, Москва, 8-10 де- кабря 2003 г. / Ред. О. В. Будницкий, К.Ю.Бурмистров,А.Б.Каменский, В. В. Мочалова. Москва: “Дом еврейской книги”, 2004. 424 с. ISBN: 5-98370-017-0. There is a certain difficulty in reviewing conference proceedings due to two main reasons: the multiplicity of subjects and the number of contributors . Every conference despite its announced theme always refers to a greater number of problems. The reviewed publication is not an exception from this general rule: the articles differ in length and content, some of them can be characterized as serious research essays while others are rather of informative character. Two problems are central for this collection: a) the problem of location and variety of primary sources on Jewish history and b) the problem of self-identification searches on the individual and community levels. The accessibility of primary sources is indeed an acute problem for the researchers in this field. Personal archives and archives of various Jewish organizations in the former Soviet Union for a long time were unavailable due to strict restrictions. A great number of the local sources, so-called pinkasei kehilot (community registry books), were destroyed during WWII, others still need a comprehensive systematization . Over the last decade, the objects of material culture (Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, Torah scrolls, etc.) and oral history records have become increasingly used as independent and important source of information on the Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The chapter by the late John Klier of the University College London focuses on the study of the Russian Jewish history in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century. Actually, in the USA the interest in Jewish history aroused after WWII and followed by reestablishment of the Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO), which was originally founded in Vilna in 1925 as Yiddish Scientific Institute. First Institute’s publications were made in Yiddish, and only in the beginning of the 1950s first publications in English appeared. The real pioneers in the field of the Jewish studies in the United States were Louis Greenberg and Isaac Levitats. From the very beginning, the problem of access to archival materials became critical for NorthAmerican researches; they could use only available secondary sources or pri- 388 Рецензии/Reviews mary sources from Israeli archives. The situation slightly improved in the middle of the 1980s, when American scholars began to consult archives in Poland and study the history of Jews in Poland and Lithuania. They also were allowed into Soviet archives to research on some “neutral ” subjects, such as the history of Russian periodicals (the media coverage of the “Jewish question” and manifestations of anti-Semitism ) and Russian revolutionary movements. Some important works by Hans J. Rogger and Ezra Mendelsohn were published then. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, access to archives was facilitated, but the identification of sources became even more complicated because of the dissolution of the formerly centralized archival system, and redistribution of documentary collections among different regional authorities, national depositaries, and academic institutions. In her essay, Olga Belova from the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences refers to the studying of objects of material culture in former Jewish communities of Podoliya and Western Belarus. One of the first ethnographical expeditions in this region of the Pale of Jewish Settlement was organized by S.An-skii in 1912–1914, when Jews comprised about 80% of the local population. The latest expedition was organized by the Institute of the Slavic Studies and the Center “St. Petersburg Judaic Studies” in 2000–2003. During the expedition, rich material on Jewish presence in the region before WWII was collected, while the survived synagogues, cemeteries, and community buildings in the former Jewish quarters of towns and villages were mapped. The working group interviewed many locals, both Jews and gentiles. It is concluded that the problem of preserving the historical memory still receives little attention from the local authorities in both Belarus and Ukraine. Dmirtii Feldman from the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) describes the difficulties in locating documents on the Jewish history in Russian archives. As it is known, RGADA stores documents dated back to the eleventh century, and the documents relating to the Jewish history (most of them refer to the first partition of Poland) are...

Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe. By Richard Alba and Nancy Foner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. 336. $35.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Toward a History of Sexual Violence behind Bars

Reviewed by: Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics by Rebecca L. Davis Benjamin Baker (bio) Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics. By Rebecca L. Davis. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 248 pp. Public Confessions appeared as the United States was experiencing Covid-19 quarantines and pitched battles over national identity. Among Americans, the pandemic raised—or revealed, depending on how one looks at it—fierce disputes about the nature of freedom, democracy, and partisanship, while on other fronts Americans just as vigorously debated race, gender, sexuality, and cancel culture. Appropriately, then, Rebecca Davis's volume explores these very issues from the lens of high profile religious conversions of last century. What do Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis, Jr., Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, Eldridge Cleaver, and Chuck Colson have in common? According to Davis, all experienced religious conversions ("confessions") in Cold War America that "moved claims of religious authenticity to the center of American political debates" and raised "questions of whether and how different kinds of faith variously anchored or undermined American freedoms" (4). Davis does not provide a working definition of the contested term "conversion," although there is rich material throughout the work to grapple with its meaning(s). Instead, in the prologue, Davis suggests that religious conversions discussed in the volume may be seen as "self-discovery," "self-invention," "self-transformation," or a kind of authenticity (1–11). [End Page 309] These notions of conversion are evident in Davis's treatment of religious conversion as not a single event, but rather a whole life lived up to the conversion event. This is in keeping with the long tradition of conversion narratives, with the requisite mention of St. Augustine, exemplar of the genre. However, discrete developments always seem to precipitate conversion, at least in retrospect. Consider Davis's subjects. Luce's daughter tragically died in a car accident in 1944, and Luce was nearing a mental collapse and attempted suicide twice. Chambers felt tremendous pressure from his double life as a Soviet spy and gay man. Davis, Jr. was nearly killed in a car accident in Los Angeles in 1954. Ali grappled with identity issues around being black in America. Colson was mired in the Watergate scandal and awaiting a legal verdict. Davis shows how these celebrities adroitly curated their personal religious conversions for the American public to further political ends. Luce presented Roman Catholicism as a democratic check to the peril of communism, with "Catholic converts [holding] the future for American power and democracy" (13). Likewise, Chambers claimed his conversion to Christianity caused him to inform on his Communist conspirators and champion conservatism. Davis, Jr. practiced and literally performed Judaism to achieve civil rights for African Americans. Ali used his conversion to the Nation of Islam to promote black power and freedom and critique American involvement in the Vietnam War. Colson parlayed his conversion to evangelical Christianity to promote white neoliberal masculinity. In an era when Americans questioned the compatibility of some faiths with democracy, namely, any faiths other than mainline Protestantism, these figures argued that their new faiths were quintessentially democratic. Public Confessions excels in demonstrating how these celebrity conversions, though from diverse backgrounds and varied faiths, all revealed essential aspects of American politics and ultimately shaped American identity. Luce shows how an America that was largely male chauvinist and anti-Catholic was moved, if only incrementally, to view women as serious religious figures and more than sexual objects, and to a consideration that Catholics could be genuinely American. Ali and Davis, Jr. defy the narrow possibilities that racism imposed on blacks and widened religious heterodoxy and political expression for African Americans. Colson demonstrates how white Christian men had the privilege to reinvent themselves despite epic wrongdoing and contributed to the rise and dominance of the Religious Right in the Reagan era and beyond. Public Confessions's strength is that it takes a complex era, group of individuals, and subject matter, and produces an intriguing volume for scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. It is the latest offering in a [End Page 310] growing literature that treats religious conversions as more than religious, per se, demonstrating their...

BackgroundThere is anecdotal evidence that many elementary teachers integrate mathematics lessons and art activities by having students first make colorful, rich material that is subsequently used in an instructional activity. However, it is unclear whether such activities effectively promote learning and transfer of mathematical concepts. The goal of the present research was to examine the use and effectiveness of such “math-and-art” activities on children’s ability to acquire basic fraction knowledge. We report the results of a survey of practicing elementary school teachers in the United States, their use of activities involving physical material, and the resources they use for ideas to supplement the standard curriculum. Two experiments examined first-grade students’ learning, transfer, and recognition of fraction knowledge from rich, contextualized material versus simple, generic material.ResultsThe survey results confirm that many U.S. teachers use math-and-art activities and are often inspired by informal sources, such as Pinterest and YouTube. Experiment 1 examined the effectiveness of colorful, contextualized student-constructed material (paper pizzas) versus simple, pre-made material (monochromatic paper circles) in an instructional activity on fractions. Students who used the pre-made circles scored higher than those who used the student-made pizzas on pre-instruction tests of basic fraction knowledge, immediate tests of learning, and delayed tests of transfer. Experiment 2 tested students’ ability to spontaneously write fractions to describe proportions of pizzas and circles. Students who answered generic circle questions first were markedly more accurate than those who answered pizza questions first.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that rich, contextualized representations, including those made by the student, can hinder students’ learning and transfer of mathematical concepts. We are not suggesting that teachers never integrate mathematics and colorful, contextualized material, and activities. We do suggest that elementary students’ mathematics learning can benefit when initial instruction involves simple, generic, pre-made material and opportunities for students to make and use colorful, contextualized representations come later.

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 497 ing Consumption and The Politics ofDomestic Consumption are fitting guide books for any historian of technology contemplatingjust such a venture. Regina Lee Blaszczyk Dr. Blaszczyk is assistant professor of history and American studies at Boston Uni­ versity, where she teaches material culture, the history of technology, and 20th-cen­ tury U.S. history. Refigwring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology. By Evelyn Fox Keller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Pp. xix+134; bibliography, index. $20.00 (cloth). Molecular biology has attracted historical attention in recent years, prompted perhaps by the Human Genome Project, the rise of the biotechnology industry, or the exuberant participant-histories of the 1970s and 1980s. A satisfactory explanation of this scientific field and its cultural and political moorings has yet to appear but much new work is on the way. Evelyn Fox Keller’s volume fills a special niche. It provides a broad overview of the uses of metaphor in scientific descriptions of the organism and the gene, and it connects molecular biology to a wide range of other technologically driven fields, including systems engi­ neering and computing. The book consists ofthree essays that Keller delivered in the June 1993 Wellek Library Lectures in Critical The­ ory at the University of California at Irvine. There are very few foot­ notes; a brief bibliography is included. Keller first explores how the concept of gene action has evolved from the turn of the century to the present. She considers the pro­ ductivity ofT. H. Morgan’s interpretation ofgene action, suggesting that the autonomous, powerful gene imagined by Morgan and his coworkers permitted them to frame important and solvable prob­ lems. By ignoring development, they could focus on phenomena that could be more easily tracked. Comparing A. H. Sturtevant’s lin­ ear construction of development to Richard Goldschmidt’s concep­ tion ofdevelopment as a complicated system, she proposes that Stur­ tevant’s ideas—which in effect subsumed development under genetics—had tremendous appeal because of their simplicity. The organism seemed to simply unfold from the genes, and even devel­ opment itselfwas genetically controlled. But gradually, over the last two or three decades, this construction of the gene and gene action has begun to unravel. The cytoplasm—traditionally gendered fe­ male—has attracted new attention, and the idea of “gene action” has been replaced by “gene activation.” Keller attributes this shift to many causes, including new technologies for manipulating DNA, shifts in gender relations, and historical relations between Germany and the United States. 498 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE In her second essay, Keller compares Maxwell’s Demon to Dar­ win’s Being to Schroedinger’s code script—his term for DNA. She points out that the informational and directive gene was, for Schroedinger and others, a solution to a paradox. This paradox was the apparent ability of life to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Though he did not use the imagery itself, Schroedinger made DNA the equivalent of Maxwell’s Demon or of the Archimedian point from which the world could be moved. The ability of life to violate physical laws was a consequence ofthe information contained in the chromosomes, he proposed, for the chromosomes in effect concen­ trated order. Here Keller excavates an important piece of the tan­ gled relationship between physics and molecular biology. For some 19th-century physicists, Maxwell’s Demon was a technologically so­ phisticated being—a pointsman on a railway, a strategist sitting at his telegraph wires—an intelligent being capable of influencing in­ dividual molecules. The mechanical nature of the Demon was im­ portant to them—itwas a machine; similarly, for Schroedinger, DNA had machine-like properties. It combined the skills of architect and builder, containing a complete plan for the execution of the body. This is rich material with the potential for further work. Finally, Keller considers the relationships between postwar systems engineers, cyberscientists, and molecular biologists. She first prom­ ises to explore the computer’s impact on biological representations of the organism but then goes on to do several other things instead. She shows that those attempting to build purposeful behavior into machines, such as systems analysts and engineers building warheads, drew on...

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The Music Division of the Library of Congress contains some of the Library's richest materials, and the Library generally regards with pride the comprehensive and valuable research collection in the field of music that has been built up under the able direction of the chiefs who have administered that Division from its earliest beginnings. By the very nature of the complex organization of the institution, however, it has not been possible to concentrate all of the Library's music materials in the one Division. Occasionally the references to music in a particular volume may not be its major element and accordingly the work has not been classified as a volume of music. Frequently the Library has accepted gifts of collections of a general content with the understanding that their integrity would not be violated; similarly the Library has made purchases of other general collections which again it has deemed wiser to maintain as integral units rather than to disperse them. A few people have long been aware of many of the musical titles and other volumes of musical interest in the custody of the Library's Rare Books Division, but since many of these books are not included in either Julia Gregory's Catalogue of Early Books on Music (before 1800) (Washington, 1913) or the supplement by Hazel Bartlett, published in 1944, their existence is often overlooked by music scholars. It is at the insistence of these scholars that we promised to prepare a short paper on the early music books published prior to 1521, which for one reason or another are shelved in the Library's Rare Books Division. The oldest volume of musical interest is a manuscript on vellum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De proprietatibus rerum, described as number 129 of the Library's manuscripts recorded in the Seymour de Ricci and William J. Wilson Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States (New York, 1935). Dated about 1400, the manuscript was written in France; it came into the Library's possession in 1933. The final leaves of this encyclopedic work contain several chapters on modulation and various types of early musical instruments, (i.e., tuba, buccina, tibia, sambuca, symphonia, cithara, lira, cimbala, sistrum, and tintinnabulum). This work because of its varied and informative content enjoyed an enormous popularity as is demonstrated by the many early printed editions