Reviews

Book reviews

Kesper-Biermann, Sylvia, Staat und Schule in Kurhessen 1813-1866 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001). Lehning, James, To Be a Citizen. The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (Cornell University Press, 2001). Reddy, William, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Romani, Roberto, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Rose, James, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism (University of Illinois Press, 2001). Rosenfeld, Sophia, A Revolution in Language. The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2001). Ruble, Blair, Second Metropolis. Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Ruff, Julius, Violence in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Rumbaut, Ruben and Portes, Alejandro (eds), Ethnicities. Children of Immigrants in America (University of California Press, 2001). Sautman, Francesca Canada and Sheingorn, Pamela (eds), Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2001). Scranton, Philip (ed.), The Second Wave. Southern Industrialization from the 19405 to the 19705 (University of Georgia Press, 2001). Lilley, Keith, Urban Life in the Middle Ages 1000-1430 (Palgrave, 2001). McCarthy, Justin, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (Arnold, 2001). Mendie, Michael (ed.), The Putney Debates of 1647. The Army, the Levellers, and the English State (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Michels, George, At War with the Church. Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-century Russia (Stanford University Press, 2001). Mills, Dennis, Rural Community History from Trade Directories (Local Population Studies, 2001). Packer, Ian, Lloyd George, Liberalism and the Land. The Land Issue and Party Politics in England, 1906-1914 (Royal Historical Society, 2001). Parrott, David, Richelieu's Army. War, Government and Society in France, 1624-1642 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Popkin, Jeremy, Press, Revolution and Social Identities in France, 1830-1835 (Penn State University Press, 2001). Rasmussen, Birgit Brander, Klinenberg, Eric, Nexica, Irene and Wray, Matt (eds), The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Duke University Press, 2001). Schechter, Patricia, Ida B. Wells-Bamett and American Reform, 1880-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Schulten, Susan, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2001). Scott, Tom, Society and Economy in Germany, 1300-1600 (Palgrave, 2001). Shackel,Paul (ed.), Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape (University Press of Florida, 2001). Smith, John (ed.), When Did Southern Segregation Begin? (Palgrave, 2002). Sokoll, Thomas (ed.), Essex Pauper Letters 1731-1831 (Oxford University Press, 2001). Spraggs, Gillian, Outlaws and Highway men.The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Pimlico, 2001). Steffen, Lisa, Defining a British State. Treason and National Identity, 1608-1820 (Palgrave, 2001). Stengers, Jean and van Neck, Anne, Masturbation. The History of a Great Terror (St Martin's Press, 2001). Sweeney, Regina, Singing Our Way to Victory. French Cultural Politics and Music during the Great War (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Veenendaal, Augustus, Railways in the Netherlands. A Brief History, 1834-1994 (Stanford University Press, 2001). Vickeiy, Amanda (ed.), Women, Privilege and Power. British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2001). Vigarello, Georges, A History of Rape. Sexual Violence in France from the 16th to the 20th Century (Polity Press, 2001). Vinson, Ben, Bearing Arms for His Majesty. The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2001). Waldinger, Roger (ed.), Strangers at the Gates. New Immigrants in Urban America (University of California Press, 2001). Worobec, Christine, Possessed. Women, Witches and Demons in Imperial Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). Xu, Xiaoqun, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State. The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai 1912-1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Aron, Cindy, Working at Play. A History of Vacations in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2001). Baron, Samuel, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union. Novocherkassk, 1962 (Stanford University Press, 2001). Bielenberg, Andy (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (Longman, 2000). Blok, Anton, Honour and Violence (Polity Press, 2001). Braddick, Michael, State Formation in Early Modem England, c. 1550-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Brading,D. A.,Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe:Image andTradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Carney, Judith, Black Rice. The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2001). Carter, Ian, Railways and Culture in Britain. The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester University Press, 2001). Cayton, Andrew and Gray, Susan (eds), The American Midwest. Essays on Regional History (Indiana University Press, 2001). Charle, Christophe, La Crise des sociétés impériales. Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne. Essai d'histoire sociale comparée (Seuil, 2001). Chojnacka, Monica, Working Women in Early Modem Venice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Cohen, Deborah, The War Come Home. Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939 (University of California Press, 2001). Cook, James, The Arts of Deception. Playing with Fraud in the Age of Burman (Harvard University Press, 2001). Cowling, Maurice, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Crubaugh, Anthony, Balancing the Scales of Justice. Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1730-1800 (Penn State University Press, 2001). Dalley, Bronwyn and Phillips, Jock (eds), Going Public.The Changing Face of New Zealand History (Auckland University Press, 2001). Delaney, Enda, Demography, State and Society. Irish Migration to Britain, 1921-1971 (Liverpool University Press, 2000). Doyle, William (ed.), Old Regime France (Oxford University Press, 2001). Elazar, Dahlia, The Making of Fascism. Class, State, and Counter-Revolution, Italy 1919-1922 (Greenwood Publishing, 2001). Epstein, Steven, Speaking of Slavery. Color, Ethnicity and Human Bondage in Italy (Cornell University Press, 2001). Feldman, Gerald, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933-1943 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Foot, John, Milan Since the Miracle. City, Culture and Identity (Berg, 2001). Fragnito, Gigliola (ed.), Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modem Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Jones, Emrys (ed.), The Welsh in London, 1300-2000 (University of Wales Press, 2001). Karpat, Kemal, The Politicization of Islam. Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford University Press, 2001). Gayot, Gérard and Minard, Philippe (eds), Les ouvriers qualifiés de l'industrie (XVF-XX si碬e) (Revue du Nord, 2001). Gildart, Keith, North Wales Miners. A Fragile Unity, 1943-1996 (University of Wales Press, 2001). Gonick, Cy, A Very Red Life. The Story of Bill Walsh (Canadian Committee on Labor History, 2001). Halliday, Stephen, Underground to Everywhere. London's Underground Railway in the Life of the Capital (Sutton, 2001). Hatcher, John and Bailey, Mark, Modelling the Middle Ages. The History and Theory of England's Economic Development (Oxford University Press, 2001). Hewitt, Nancy, Southern Discomfort. Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 18805-19205 (University of Illinois Press, 2001). Heywood, Colin, A History of Childhood (Polity, 2001). Johansen, Shawn, Family Men. Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America (Routledge, 2001). Johnson, Patricia, Hidden Hands. Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction (University of Ohio Press, 2001).

Introduction: the Sociology of Medical Science and Technology

If we wanted to find out what it might have felt like to have lived at a certain time and place, then according to one popular way of understanding their value, autobiography and biography would be...

Reviews of Books

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Giorgio Agamben argued that the executive (presidential order) issued on 13 November 2001, which authorized indefinite detention and trial by military commission (not tribunal) of noncitizens involved in terrorist activities, constituted a state of exception. This order went further than the Patriot Act (26 October 2001) which allowed seven days' detention of suspicious ‘aliens’. The order produced ‘detainees’ (from captured Taliban in Afghanistan) not subject to American law or the Geneva Convention for POWs. With neither legal identity nor personhood such detainees were nationally and internationally unrecognizable or illegible. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp.3–4. For an extended discussion of ‘bare life’, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp.5–14 and 35–76. Judith Butler makes passing use of Patterson's phrasing of nineteenth century slavery to describe life not framed as grievable in post-9/11 conflict. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable (London: Verso, 2009), p.44. 3 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Nazi Photographs in Post-Holocaust Art: Gender as an Idiom of Memorialization’, in Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative, eds, Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), pp.19–40; Dominick LaCapra History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp.106–143. 4 Susannah Radstone, ‘Social Bonds and Psychical Order: Testimonies’, Cultural Values, 5.1 (2001), p.61. 5 Amy Hungerford, ‘Memorizing Memory’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14.1 (2001), pp.78–83; and The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 6 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp.269–297; Shoshana Felman, ‘Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching’, ‘After the Apocalypse: Paul de Man and the Fall to Silence’, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp.1–56, pp.120–64, pp.204–83; Cathy Caruth, ‘Trauma and Experience: Introduction’, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp.3–12; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 7 Dominick LaCapra History in Transit, pp.115–27; Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp.23–4, 27–8, 30, 35, 37, 41, 46, 48, 59, 64–5, 77. 8 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1988). 9 Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.41, 43, 46. 10 Maria Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp.68–9. 11 Dean Franco, ‘What we talk about when we talk about Beloved’, Modern Fiction Studies, 52:2 (2006), pp.417–29. 12 Edward P. Jones, The Known World (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), pp. 166–74. 13 For example, Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007); John Updike, Terrorist (New York: Knopf, 2006); Jess Walter, The Zero (New York: Regan, Harper Collins, 2006). 14 Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (London: Penguin, 2006), pp.187–9 and 208–16. 15 Laura Frost, ‘Still Life: 9/11’s Falling Bodies', in Literature after 9/11, eds, Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p.186; for a discussion of post-9/11 trauma and temporality in Foer's work, see Mitchum Huehls, ‘Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11’s Timely Trauma's, in Literature after 9/11, eds, Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp.42–59. 16 Jenny Edkins, ‘Ground Zero: Reflections on Trauma, In/distinction and Response’, Journal for Cultural Research, 8:3 (2004), pp.247–70. See also Mark Wigley, ‘Insecurity by Design’, in After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, eds, Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.71–3, 75–6, 80–1, 82–4; Eric Darton, ‘The Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism: Minoru Yamasaki, Mohammed Atta, and Our World Trade Centre’, in After the World Trade Centre, pp.88–9, 90–1. 17 Jean Baudrillard, ‘L'Esprit du Terrorisme’, in South Atlantic Quarterly: Dissent from the Homeland, eds, Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, 101:2 (2002), pp. 407, 405, 405–6, 409, 409–14. 18 W. J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp.xi-xix. 19 David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp.8–11. 20 Valerie Martin, Property (London: Abacus, 2009), pp.3–5. 21 Susan V. Donaldson, ‘Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South’, The Southern Literary Journal, 40:2 (2008), p.279. 22 Valerie Martin, Property, pp. 109, 137–8, 166, 170, 205, 207–9. 23 Susan V. Donaldson, ‘Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South’, p.273. 24 Valerie Martin, Property, pp.82–3. 25 Valerie Martin, Property, p.74. 26 Susan V. Donaldson, ‘Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South’, p.279. 27 For a discussion of intimacy and subjection in slave narratives, see Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp.13–26. 28 For a similar reading of this scene, see Susan V. Donaldson, ‘Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South’, pp.274–5. 29 Judith Butler, Frames of War, pp.1, 4–5, 7–10, 12–15, 23 29, 45, 51, 72–5, 78–80, 95–5. 30 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2009), pp.8–11, 25–26, 20, 30 31 Toni Morrison, A Mercy, pp.141–2. 32 Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minnesota and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2009), pp.155, 157–8, 160–1, 168–9, 170–1, 173–5, 178, 183. Adriana Caverero has noted, for example, that the postures of the tortured and torturers, the enforced tableaux of torture, are quotations from an archive of the history of torture, or more precisely of iconic images (from Nazi Germany and the Ku Klux Klan's regimes of terror in the American South) that have been spectacularly disseminated. To quote Caverero: ‘What stands out in them is a spectral caricature of torture reduced to the level of filthy farce. Phantasmic copies… [in which] the Abu Ghraib tormenters and their victims appear as spectres’. In the case of Abu Ghraib, power only reveals itself in terms of caricature, or bad theatre. For Caverero, the unmasking of the illegality of torture is secondary to this structural revelation: that torture is spectral, fictitious, and that miming torture before the camera masks torture off-set. The global reach of the images from Abu Ghraib, the excessive visuality of the event, became the perfect means by which power represented itself to itself. Adriana Caverero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p.111. 33 On the frame's subsumption of power in the case of the Abu Ghraib photographs, see Judith Butler, Frames of War, pp.72–5, 78, 94–5; on overcoming the frames that we ratify, see pp.99–100; on the ethical act, see p.180. Dora Apel has argued something similar in her examination of the twenty-first-century legacy of lynching in American culture. The exhibition of the photographic images, taken between 1880 and 1960, of lynching, and the publication of those images, between 2000–2002 has informed a new-found sensitivity to racist violence in the present that bears the hallmarks of lynching (the significance of which is often ignored by police authorities). The dissemination of these images has also been a spur to the historical consciences of white audiences in prompting them to think through their relationship with their counterparts: photographed enthusiastic, voyeuristic white onlookers and perpetrators. However, in a post-9/11 cultural environment in which the signifier of ‘terrorism’ has come to describe and define a range of violent acts, the location of terror in past and present acts of lynching has often lent unqualified support to the fight against terror abroad in terms of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, the identification of social death on American soil does not necessarily encourage moral conduct in theatre of war. See Dora Apel, ‘On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after 9/11’, American Quarterly, 55:3 (2003), pp.457–478. 34 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp.12–16.

A review of AIMS MCGUINNESS. Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. xiii, 249. $35.00 (US).

It has been said time and again that the paradigm of Third World nationalism is the Hegelian narrative of lordship and bondage – the struggle for recognition. As the hegemonic petty‐bourgeois elite...

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Reviews of Books

Finance 2.0

In "A Study of Customs Pertaining to Twins in Bali," Jane Belo (1970) addresses a puzzling question. When Balinese commoners gave birth to twins1 (in the 1930s), the parents and twins were banished from the village for a period, their house was dismantled, and a ritual of purification of the village was performed after the untoward event. The birth of twins to high nobles, by contrast, was greeted with joy. The reason for the difference in reception of twins between highand lower-status people rested on the belief "that the twins had had contact amounting to marital intimacy before birth, in the womb of the mother. For some this intimacy was a good and very portentous thing, and the high caste princes and priests claimed that the boy was born like a god, that he brought his wife with him out of the mother's womb" (Belo 1970:3). By this logic, commoner twins, far from the gods, were incestuous: "It is incestuous for opposite-sex twins to occupy a womb; but the higher the status, the less abominable the incest, since for the gods incest is proper" (Boon 1977:138). Twin-birth beliefs form a condensed icon for whole marriage systems in insular Southeast Asia's Indic States, where high nobles strive to marry close (at best, first cousins) while close marriage is abhorred or was prohibited to lower people. Incest or its compromise act, close marriage, in short, is a statement about status; among commoners, Geertz has remarked (1982), incest is less a sin than a status mistake. The "text" of incest prohibitions has been read in a variety of ways. Some commentators explicate the local meanings of particular societies' taboos, often implying that no persuasive general theory of "incest" can be put forward (e.g., Needham 1971:29). Persuasive or not, general theories continue to be generated by others who, admitting the prohibited categories vary, are impressed with the universality of a (variable) prohibition. Throughout this article I tack between a localist's concern with cultural meanings and social and political action, and a universalist's (especially structuralist's) comparative scope-but not beyond Oceania, and with no theory claiming to explain "the" incest taboo. Using "incest" as the rhetorical motivator, I use the occasion of this essay to recast the conceptualization of groupings in insular Southeast Asia, to explore the dynamics of marriage in the preferentially endogamous "cognatic" societies of insular

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"Greek" is a ubiquitous stereotype in the discourse of Greek Americans. They know "Greek" reflects on themselves, though they are sometimes puzzled by the "Greek" component of their identities. Constructing these identities is problematic for them principally because there is no single "Greek" identity. "Greek" is refracted by various images and tropes, or figures of speech, each operating in different structural settings. My argument here is that this simple observation about tropes in American talk about ethnicity opens up a new way to think about ethnicity in the United States. My aim is to pose the problem of ethnicity at home in radically cultural terms. My examination of the operations of one trope-irony-on ethnic stereotypes in Greek American talk leads me to suggest that an anthropology of ethnicity must take note of irony and, more, may use it to make a new beginning in the analysis of systems of meaning. Ethnicity belongs to that assortment of cultural operators (Boon 1973) with which anthropology has made distinctive contributions among the social sciences and humanities to understanding social life: the rendering of complex cultural processes as cultural (rather than psychological or economic). This anthropological collection houses les pensees sauvage of tricksters (Beidelman 1980), totemism (L6vi-Strauss 1963, 1966), animal categories and verbal abuse (Leach 1964), food (Douglas 1975; Feeley-Harik 1981), rites of affliction (Turner 1968), and more. However, since they are not exotic, each is a worker that engages the fundamental and fundamentally social tasks of fitting the categorical around the situational. All are transformers in cultures-hence they are moral, as emphasized by social anthropologists-and rendering their powers makes the theoretical enterprise of anthropology worthwhile. But the lessons of the cultural operations of ethnicity abroad have never been brought home. Drummond (1980), for example, observed that a "creole" ethnic intersystem is not a static structure, but variant possibilities connected by transformations in a continuum. The inconsistencies and contradictions in everyday use of ethnic and racial categories in Guyana are products of shifting within a continuum. He writes, "Internal variation and change are methodologically and

Book Reviews