Fictive Kinship Research Articles

Developing a Culturally Responsive Breast Cancer Screening Promotion with Native Hawaiian Women in Churches

This article presents findings from research to develop the promotional component of a breast cancer screening program for Native Hawaiian women associated with historically Hawaiian churches in medically underserved communities.The literature on adherence to health recommendations and health promotions marketing guided inquiry on screening influences. Focus groups and individual interviews patterned on the culturally familiar practice of talk story were conducted with 60 Hawaiian women recruited through religious and social organizations.Text data were analyzed with an incremental process involving content analysis and Airhihenbuwa's PEN-3 model. Key informants and senior colleagues reviewed preliminary findings to ensure accuracy of interpretation. Findings reflect collectivist values at the intersection of indigenous Hawaiian culture and religiosity. Inclusion of messages that encourage holistic health across the intergenerational continuum of extended family and fictive kin, reinforcement from spiritual leaders, and testimonials of cancer survivors and family members may facilitate Hawaiian women's screening intent.

Sources of Support for African-American Family Members of Homicide Victims

ABSTRACT The rates of homicide within the African-American community indicate a population overwhelmingly impacted by traumatic grief and loss. A qualitative study was conducted to: (1) discover the support networks that are utilized by African-American family members who are surviving the homicide of a loved one; (2) gain insight relative to understanding the post-homicide experience of African-American surviving family members. A purposive sample of five African-American survivors participated in a semi-structured interview. Findings indicated that the informal social support provided by immediate and extended family, fictive kin and friends was the primary source of support that was used to cope with the homicide of their loved ones. However, respondents indicated a need to incorporate formal social support systems (e.g., therapeutic interventions) to help them cope with their grief. Respondents identified distrust of clinical and research institutions, fear of stigmatization, and level of comfort with clinicians, as potential barriers to seeking support for African-American family members who are surviving the homicide of a loved one. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Służąca, pracownik, domownik. Polki jako pomoce domowe w Neapolu w kontekście retradycjonalizacji instytucji

The text is based on fieldwork research in Naples, mainly on the analysis of in-depth interviews with Polish female migrant domestic workers. The analysis is presented against the background of re-traditionalisation of the institution of domestic service, caused by contemporary migration processes, which introduce serious asymmetry to the situation of domestic worker. Combining own research materials with the information from literature concerning contemporary and past domestic workers, the text aims at individuating and describing basic models of relationships between domestic worker and employers. The individuated models are: “overt degradation”, “fictive kinship”, “professionalisation” and “friendly professionalism”. The article employs symbolic-interactional perspective to show the interplay between models and perspectives and the ways the models are used in everyday interactions between domestic workers and employers.

Perceptions and (re)presentations of familiarity and foreignness: The cultural politics of translation in the subtitling of Japanese animation by fans

This paper studies the leisure activity of anime fansubbing, where fans of Japanese animation subtitle these shows for distribution to other fans in their own native languages. This activity is studied within the framework of cultural politics whereby it will be shown that fansubbers, as “lead‐producers,” hold perceptions of cultural differences and how these differences should be (re)presented. Illustrated empirically using the themes of male/female, fictive kinship and human emotive discourse, fansubbers understand and promote the dichotomy of East/West by conceptualizing “Other” cultures as “Another,” in that they imply that “Other” cultures are “different” but must be accommodated in order for consumption to take place. In this regard, fansubbers actively engage in a constant negotiation of “familiarity” and “foreignness” within an imaginary and normative framework.

De-Legitimizing Terrorism: Creative Engagement and Understanding of the Psycho-Social and Political Processes Involved in Ideological Support for Terrorism

In recent years the world has witnessed a proliferation of global terrorism much of it carried out by groups ideologically connected to each other by the common reliance on a shared (although individualistically and often nationalistically expressed) militant jihadist ideology which makes use of distorted tenets of Islam. This militant jihadist ideology claims that Islam is under attack and rallies its adherents to join the global jihad – a war in defense of Islam. It makes a global call to Muslims all over the world to place their religious allegiances above all other allegiances (i.e. familial, national, etc.) and to consider themselves as the “fictive kin” or “Muslim brothers” of all Muslims everywhere. Disturbing events in conflict zones (i.e. Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, and Afghanistan) are offered by these groups as concrete and alarming examples for advancing their ideology with its core theme that Islam is under attack and that therefore extreme and violent methods are justified to defend Islam and Islamic people and values everywhere. Promising to address the suffering they call to their adherents attention, and to not only end this suffering but to bring about a new world order – one that promises social justice and moral living in accordance with the tenets of the Quran terror groups promote a militant jihadist ideology that rallies their forces, increases their pool of sympathizers, raises funds and operational support and most importantly motivates their members and new recruits to enact suicide terrorism – the most lethal of weapons in the terrorists’ arsenal.

“It's Like a Family”

This article contributes to carework scholarship by examining the nexus of gender, class, and race in long-term care facilities. We draw out a family ideology at work that promotes good care of residents and thus benefits nursing homes. We also found that careworkers value fictive kin relationships with residents, yet we uncover how the family model may be used to exploit these low-income careworkers. Reflecting a subordinate and racialized version of being “part of the family,” we call for an ethic of reciprocity and for concrete change toward valuing equally the humanity of those who need and those who give care.

Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (review)

Reviewed by: Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians Christina Snyder (bio) Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians. By Amy C. Schutt. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 264. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00.) In Peoples of the River Valleys, Amy Schutt traces the history of the Native peoples of the Delaware and Hudson valleys—most of whom came to be called "Delawares" or "Lenapes"—from 1609 to 1783. Although Schutt ranges broadly, she focuses mostly on how this group built and maintained alliances. Throughout this period, the Delawares forged ties with their neighbors in Pennsylvania and, more successfully, with other Indian groups. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Delawares secured a lofty reputation among Indian groups as great alliance builders and peacemakers; in the kinship-based parlance of Native diplomacy, [End Page 783] they were "grandfathers." Drawing upon careful archival research, including German-language Moravian sources, Schutt demonstrates how these disparate "peoples of the river valleys" became the grandfathers of eastern North America. The first portion of the book introduces the Native people who inhabited the Delaware and Hudson valleys in the seventeenth century and their early interactions with Europeans. According to Schutt, these people based their identity on kin and community ties, bonds reinforced by allegiance to leaders and participation in rituals. Schutt hints at the importance of the Delawares' early relationship to the Iroquois, a powerful confederacy of five (later six) nations. Although this line of inquiry is underdeveloped, it seems plausible that the Delawares' sixteenth-century dealings with the Iroquois equipped them with the diplomatic skills that facilitated later alliances. Schutt, however, is more interested in how the Delawares dealt with European colonization. She argues that they "responded to the warfare, epidemic disease, and other tumultuous events of the seventeenth century by developing and using networks of trade and other forms of exchange, creating new alliances, sharing territories, and in some cases merging with other groups" (31). Although initially peaceful, the relationship between the Delawares and the colony of Pennsylvania soured: Squatters invaded Delaware country, squabbles between settlers and Indians turned violent, the disgraceful "Walking Purchase" outraged Delaware leaders. In response, Delawares employed several strategies that they had developed in early encounters with Europeans. Many moved. Some formed new multiethnic Indian communities. Others found a new home among the Moravians who settled the forks of the Delaware. As Schutt demonstrates, the Delawares found surprising strength in this diaspora, for it enabled them to build power-conferring alliances with a diverse array of peoples. As Delaware leaders constructed ties of fictive kinship with host communities, they consciously carved out a role for the Delaware people as peacemakers and alliance builders. In fact, before they became "grandfathers," Delaware leaders called their people "women." As opposed to Indian men, who were often warriors, Native women made peace. By depicting themselves as nonviolent mediators, the Delawares forged ties with groups from the Great Lakes to New England. Despite the efforts of pacific chiefs like White Eyes, neutrality became an untenable path by the late eighteenth century. As Schutt demonstrates, the tensions surrounding the American Revolution "sabotaged [End Page 784] Delaware attempts to find consensus and come together as a people" (150). Many of the Delawares' allies sided with the British. Moreover, the Delawares—themselves a coalition of diverse peoples—took different paths during the conflict. Schutt concludes that the Delawares' chain of alliances, so carefully wrought through decades of diplomacy, fractured under the weight of war. Her epilogue, however, makes it clear that those bonds were damaged but not broken, for the Delawares continued to call on their old allies during the conflicts of the 1790s and thereafter as they faced forced removal from their homeland. Although Schutt illuminates the history of this important group in early America, her book offers too little interpretation. Often obfuscated, the overall argument—that alliance-building defined the Delawares and enabled them to survive as a people—comes through most clearly in chapter 5. Also, she does not explain her decision to focus on the period from 1609 to 1783, and while I applaud her epilogue, which briefly follows Delaware migrations from the Revolution...

Who is Kin?

This article explores the ways in which African Americans, define family and kinship. Using data collected using ethnographic methods, issues such as the level of ongoing commitment to extended family structures, fictive kin status and obligations and pathways to kinship status are examined. This study has broad implications for the delivery of culturally appropriate services to African American individuals and families.

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment

Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building (review)

Laura A. Ring, Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, October, 2006, 224 pp. Louis Wirth famously described urban social relations as anonymous. view that city dwellers are largely strangers one another has been widely challenged by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians since 1950s. Nonetheless, while stranger is no longer a problem for ethnographer who arrives find groups and networks flourishing, living among strangers remains an existential problem for many urban residents. In Karachi, a city riven by ethnic and sectarian violence since 1980s, such problems take on added significance. In her gracefully written and incisively argued book, Laura Ring contends that everyday efforts of women in Karachi transform neighbors into-if not quite kin-something other than strangers, are labors of peace. problems of what Ring calls have received less attention than they deserve, largely because ethnographic studies of cities have tended be oriented around ethnic and/or economically marginal neighborhoods whose residents are often tied one another by more than locality. book's setting is a multi-story, lower-middle class apartment building, pseudonymously called The Shipyard, sheltering nearly fifty families with members of most major ethnic groups of Pakistan (Pattans, Baluchis, Punjabis, Sindhis) pursuing a variety of livelihoods (government doctors and engineers, teachers, shopkeepers). Such multistory apartment buildings have risen only in last three decades, but have quickly become common in this expanding city. Most of their residents have moved from old neighborhoods in city center or from peripheral one- or two-story colonies that are rather homogeneous (at least at scale of lane), settled by kin, caste, ethnic, and sectarian groups. Ring shows how residents, with partial success, attempt to draw familiar social forms into new space of apartment (15). One man is desperate rent apartment next his for his brother in order reconstitute a joint family household (the rental agent refuses, Two brothers, side by side, they'd never leave! [15]). As in other sorts of neighborhoods, residents make fictive kin of their neighbors through use of kin terms (bhai [brother], baji [sister], bhabi [brother's wife]). focus of study is on women's neighboring practices (4) in zenana. Zenana literally means women's space, but in Ring's account it is not a fixed physical space but a realm of women's sociality existing at sufferance of men, expanding with their absence and contracting with their presence. Unlike most participant observers, who are more observers than participants, author was fully involved in this world. She moved into apartment building with her three-year-old son and husband, a Karachi Shia with Sindhi and Muhajir parents. As she notes, I did not simply 'act' of interested, active neighbor...! (often unselfconsciously) lived part (30). Like most ethnographers, she uses her own ignorance and reactions as a foil for residents' understandings and emotions, but not as an outsider. She is of flow of activity-gossiping, exchanging foods, visiting, fixing a leaky water tank, advising a couple on character of a boy whom they are considering marrying their daughter, rushing out one door during an electrical fire while men go out another. Ring argues both Western liberal ideology (figuring home as a private, feminine realm, cut off from world of [2]) and post-colonial studies (concentrating on Indian reformist views of domestic as sites of cultural authenticity untouched by colonial power) have missed broader political significance of what takes place within zenana. These approaches have failed explore the spaces and social relations of dwelling-of household, apartment building, neighborhood, backyard, balcony-as sites of political processes, not just of gendered and generational conflict but of class, ethnic, racial, and national struggles (3). …

Karl Polanyi, Marshall Sahlins, and the Study of Ancient Social Relations

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Questions arise whenever social-scientific models are used in analysis of ancient texts, particularly regarding feasibility of their application to social and cultural milieux different from those from which they were derived. An essay I authored that assessed command in Luke 6 to love your enemies from perspective of ancient reciprocity ethics, and that invoked Marshall Sahlins's taxonomy of reciprocity relations (general, balanced, and negative reciprocity), was queried by Zeba Crook on precisely this point, namely, whether it applied Sahlins's taxonomy to Greco-Roman reciprocity relations without adequate attention to distinctions between kinship organized tribal societies (the focus of Sahlins's analysis) and socially stratified agrarian societies characteristic of ancient Mediterranean world.1 Crook's piece was more than just a critique on that point; it raised questions about extent to which Sahlins's model has applicability to Roman world. This essay will focus on this key point and, it is hoped, will also contribute to discussion on use of social-scientific research in biblical studies. I argued that reciprocity is manifested in three genres. To summarize, general reciprocity is characteristic of intimate relationships of kinship and friendship. Its emblematic feature is generous sharing, which generates gratitude and an open-ended, diffuse obligation to make a return. Balanced reciprocity features overt concern for equivalence and timeliness of exchange. While it frames such transactions as labor exchanges among kin and friends, it is also characteristic of more distant relationships in which selfinterest and material concerns take priority over human bond itself, as in market exchange. Negative reciprocity is maximization of one's own benefit at expense of another, in its pronounced forms amounting to exploitation.2 The question arises about portability of this typology. According to Crook, Sahlins cannot have imagined that his model of reciprocity would be abstract enough to apply to all cultural and social situations, least of all to archaic, pre-modern, or modern contexts, that is, those with a state and central form of government such as existed in Greco-Roman period; moreover, the cultural and social presuppositions and context employed by work directly against any attempt to apply model unaltered across cultures.3 This is because correlated this spectrum of reciprocity dynamics with variable of social distance from kinship group, organizing principle of tribal societies. Because Sahlins's model is so closely tied to exchange relations among kin, Crook argues, it cannot translate without major modifications to stratified Greco-Roman world, where an additional factor, status distance, particularly as expressed in clientelism, is mechanism for much exchange. Because in Greco-Roman context fictive kinship was invoked to express patron-client relation, naive application of Sahlins's kinship-based reciprocity model would conflate what are in fact distinct modes of exchange. Accordingly, Crook advocates recourse to reciprocity model outlined by Ekkehard and Wolfgang Stegemann. The Stegemanns' model, Crook claims, takes cognizance of factor of status-different exchange because it significantly modifies Sahlins's reciprocity rubrics, namely, by adding a new category, familial reciprocity, to encompass kinship exchange, and then by repositioning Sahlins's general reciprocity category to subsume clientelistic exchanges characteristic of Roman world.4 In effect, Crook desires a model flexibly capable of adding categories as needed to classify all sorts of transactions, sheer variety of which will increase along with complexity of a society.5 When we turn to Sahlins's own discussion of his model, it turns out to be a bit more complex than one might have gathered from Crook's description. …

Child Only Kinship Care Cases

The passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 changed the way America sought to help its most vulnerable citizens. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) legislation required families to work first. Many families with young children found the stringent requirements of TANF too restrictive for their needs. In this study a number of TANF customers were either physically ill or suffered mental health problems thus preventing them from finding suitable employment. Additionally they may have children who have health problems, which preclude the parent from work activity. Faced with time limits these families may rely on relatives or fictive kin to assume the responsibility of receiving TANF grants for the children so that they may avoid sanctions and possible loss of support for their children. These arrangements are called child-only cases. Given that poverty is related to neglect and neglect may result in out of home placement, these children are at risk for child welfare intervention. Child welfare systems look to kin to assume the responsibility of child rearing to reduce the number of children especially African American children who enter care. However, TANF and informal arrangements for kin to take care of children result in substantially less money for families. An evaluation of TANF is needed to determine if this legislation provides an adequate system for caring for needy families and children. doi:10.1300/J045v22n03_04.

Fictive Kin and Social Capital

In this article, the authors suggest that peers have the potential to create fictive kin networks, and in this role, peers become a social support that helps enable a culture of success. Discussing peer counselors and their role in helping students understand financial aid, the authors’ purpose is to suggest that peer groups—as social relationships that cut across classroom connections—create a viable solution that helps youth attain access to college. Findings from focus groups, observations, and interviews suggest that students benefit from the socioemotional and informational aspects of participating in peer counseling programs.

A Fitting “Social Model”: Culturally Locating Telemadre.Com

Telemadre.com is a website that represents what its producers call a “social model,” by which, for a fee, unemployed mothers cook meals for young professionals who do not have time to cook for themselves. In this paper we analyze this “social model” as a mediated relationship that is related to existing strands of contemporary Spanish culture and society. Drawing from existing ethnographic research and an analysis of the website itself we suggest the success of telemadre.com lies in (1) the ambiguous line it draws between (fictive) kinship and economic transaction; (2) its cultural embeddedness in diverse contemporary and traditional Spanish understandings of gender roles, expertise and knowledge; and (3) the mediated nature of the social relationships it entails.

Creating Relatives You Don’t Have: Kinship Care, Social Services and Fictive Kin

What can we learn about kinship care and the effective delivery of supportive social services when we talk to relative caregivers in San Francisco, California? Practicing anthropology in a social service setting with kinship caregivers raises some interesting questions regarding "fictive kin" and effective social service delivery. Our findings from a four-year mixed methods study of kinship care families illuminate the ways that kinship families rely on a community-based social service program in a familial manner. Furthermore, the perception of social service providers functioning like extended family members both increases client satisfaction with the services as well as the ability of social service workers to build positive working relationships with clients.

Patrilateral Bias among a Traditionally Egalitarian People: Ju/'hoansi Naming Practice

The Ju/'hoansi (!Kung) of Namibia and Botswana are unusual for the strong norm to name children exclusively for kin and primarily for grandparents. Naming carries important significance by linking the two namesakes and because names are a basis for extending fictive kin links. In the 1950s Lorna Marshall reported that the father has the right to name children and that he invariably named them for the paternal grandparents, although having the option of naming children born later for his wife's parents. The authors used a large database of genealogical information that was collected nearly concurrently with Marshall's report to test the strength of the naming rule and found that approximately 70 per cent of men name the first-born son or daughter for their own parent of the child's gender. The degree of compliance is of interest because it falls short of 100 per cent. However, analysis of the naming patterns reveals a strong patrilateral bias in naming for the paternal rather than the maternal grandparents. This type of gender and unilateral bias is not normally reported for Ju/'hoansi, who are otherwise described as gender egalitarian and bilateral in most customary practices.

Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian-Mahican Prophet

This article offers a reconsideration of the Stockbridge-Mahican Indian sachem, Hendrick Aupaumut. Most treatments of Aupaumut's career have focused exclusively on his service as a commissioned agent of the newly established United States, whose job was to attempt to avert a war with the Indians of the Ohio and Great Lakes regions who protested the American claims to territory west of the Ohio River. While Aupaumut did indeed serve as an intermediary between the United States and the Western Indians, he should also be considered as a leader of a revitalization movement. Like the Shawnee Prophet, Aupaumut blended elements of traditional religion and Christianity in the effort to equip his people with the tools necessary to survive in a radically altered world. During his three decades as chief sachem of the Stockbridge Indians, Aupaumut articulated a philosophy that was at once fully Mahican and fully Christian. In the Christian idea of a common descent from Adam and Eve, Aupaumut found a means of extending the traditional tribal ties of fictive kinship. And in his people's Mahican past, Aupaumut found a society that embodied the ideals of virtuous republicanism. With this melded philosophy, Aupaumut sought to make a place for Mahicans in the new republic, challenging the increasing racialism embraced both by followers of the Shawnee and citizens and officials of the United States.

Fictive Kin: Friends as Family Supporting Older Adults as They Age

Assessing social support or social capital is receiving renewed attention in health care. A search of the nursing literature revealed limited attention to a potential resource in the care of older adults--fictive kin. Transdisciplinary searches indicated that "fictive kin" or "chosen kin" are increasingly important as family size shrinks and older adults live longer lives. Fictive kin are common across cultural groups and some have designated special names for these quasi-family members. The purpose of this article is to advance the concept of fictive kin as a resource for older adults and to provide strategies to promote engagement of fictive kin in health care planning by nurses.

Anthropology and the United States Military: Coming of Age in the Twenty-first Century (review)

Pamela R. Frese & Margaret C. Harrell, editors. Preface by John P. Hawkins. and the United States Military: Coming of Age in the Twenty-first Century. Palgrave-McMillan, 2003. 192 pp. All of us, in this first decade of the 21st century, live in an ever more crowded, complex, and definitely more violent world. Global wars between nation states have been replaced by asymmetric conflict of which anthropologists appear to know so little. At this very moment a new kind of American warrior, fighting a new kind of war, soldiers in far flung corners of the earth; and thus, we might well ask if it isn't somewhat premature to declare that: this volume we celebrate a kind of coming of age, that of the anthropology of the U.S. military. We learn in Jeanne Guillemin's contribution about: Medical Risks and the Volunteer Army; Pamela Frese explores: How anthropological concepts including residence patterns, descent systems, and fictive kin intersect with social class, race, and gender in American military culture; and she provides the conclusion to: this particular, mostly post-modern consideration of: Anthropology and the U.S. Military. Margaret Harrell introduces the various featured topics in her: Subject, Audience and Voice and focuses more specifically on: Gender- and Class-Based Role Expectations for Army Spouses. Joshua Linford-Steinfeld analyzes: Weight Control and Physical Readiness Among Navy Personnel; whereas Clementine Fujimura introduces us to: Integrating Diversity and Understanding the Other at the U.S. Naval Academy. Only Robert Rubenstein and Anna Simmons focus on topics that more directly approach the complexities of relevant current military structures and operations. In their analyses of: Peace keepers and Politics, and Military Advisor as Warrior-King and Other Going Native Temptations, respectively, Rubenstein correctly recognizes, and notes quite perceptively that: Often the people we (the anthropologists) most need to affect with our work are members of communities that we (most often) stigmatize and avoid. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the military... Anna Simmons reminds us (of what we only too frequently overlook and/or ignore completely) that: Although anthropologists and military advisors may seem to make strange bedfellows, they actually have more in common than meets the eye. She recalls for us of just why E. T. Lawrence and Edward Landsdale ucceeded as advisors while at the same time operating effectively as consummate strategists in London and Washington, and why the flawed and yet so gifted John Paul Vann tragically failed in the end to make a difference either in Vietnam or Washington. Traditional forms of deterrence and traditionally structured armed forces are no longer viable, they are no longer effective with foes, and in circumstances, that no longer represent nation states. Now the preferred targets are civilians, attacked not by soldiers but by suicide-seeking martyrs. These individuals seek death while their most potent weapon becomes their own bodies. The former global symmetry of inter-nation state conflict has become the asymmetry of terrorism. This is no longer the Cold War where much about the capabilities and military structures of our opponents were known. In these asymmetric conflicts the usual balance of power, whereby peace results in an equalibrium between rival entities, no longer applies. MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) has been rendered obsolete. Yet, as in the Cold War there is no foreseeable timetable, and Americans, including anthropologists have to accept the unpleasant reality of a conflict that will last for decades. War has transfigured into unconventional contest with a soft humanitarian component. Furthermore, but certainly no less importantly, the gulf between the anthropologist's two traditional roles-that of field researcher and that of analyst has become ever more intricate and challenging. …

The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, and: Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism (review)

Reviewed by: The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, and: Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism Ernst Gerhardt The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. By Patrick J. Geary. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. 199 pp. $24.95 (cloth). Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism. By Robert H. Wiebe. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. 282 pp. $24.95 (cloth). Both Robert H. Wiebe's Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism and Patrick J. Geary's The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe present profitable introductory histories of nationalism that are geared toward general audiences. Each author keeps endnotes to a minimum, with extensive citations replaced by recommendations for further reading. Wiebe's recommendations take the form of a forty-page bibliographical essay that will prove a valuable resource for students seeking a quick-and-dirty history not only of general studies of nationalism [End Page 248] from the 1950s on, but also of a wide range of particular nationalisms.While both authors ground their books in contemporary concerns, Geary is especially alarmed by the rise of neonationalism and the attendant threat of racial and ethnic violence in Europe. Wiebe, on the other hand, worrying that the late-twentieth-century prospects of global capitalism's triumph over nationalism "looks more and more like tomorrow's dead end" (p. 215), provocatively concludes that nationalism, along with socialism and democracy, might prove to "live on as resistance movements, channeling aspirations that the current universe of states has frustrated" (p. 220). As these concerns and conclusions imply,Wiebe and Geary take entirely different routes in their discussions of nationalism. Wiebe aims his study squarely at what he identifies as aWestern intellectual demonization of nationalism that avoids dealing not only with the popular appeal of nationalism but also with its capability to resist foreign imperialism. In response to this demonization,Wiebe does two things: he refuses to cast nationalism as an elitist ruse—"Rather than a gigantic fraud perpetrated time and time again on the individual masses, nationalism thrived because it addressed basic human needs" (p. 11)—and he refuses to see global capitalism as an unproblematic, albeit, new, enlightenment—"Economic motivations are not inherently rational and village identities are not inherently backward. Ethnic pride is not the mark of a first-class grudge, a second-class citizen, or a third-class mind" (p. 218). It is this stance that underwritesWiebe's history of nationalism as a response to a nineteenth-century breakdown of social life. Just as nationalism—a "fictive kin composite" (or ethnicity) with a "political objective" (p. 18)—arose as a response to the dissolution of the family under economic pressures, parallel disruptions in working and public life produced socialism and democracy. It is the state, always "ambitious to devour all other loyalties for its own purposes" (p. 47), that Wiebe makes culpable for violence done in the name of a co-opted nationalism (or socialism, or democracy, for that matter). In this view, nineteenth-century Europe was an ideological battle royal in which socialism, democracy, and nationalism vied for survival by combining with the "other great dividers of the nineteenth century: language, race, and religion" (p. 53). Identifying these "great dividers" as accessories added to nationalism rather than characteristic or perhaps even productive of it is a too easy exculpation of nationalist doctrine, and Wiebe's reluctance to discuss these "great dividers" more fully highlights this argument's service to Wiebe's larger thesis that nationalism retains the potential for answering to vital modern political needs. [End Page 249] Wiebe, before discussing the spread of nationalism, turns his attention to the United States, arguing that two factors contributed to the development of democracy in America: its weak central government and its definition of social boundaries along a white-black racial axis. Both factors facilitated the assimilation of European immigrants, at least in the North; the South developed a nationalism that derived from racism. Nevertheless, Wiebe maintains that America functioned as a negative of the picture in Europe, with democracy as its "proxy nationalism," uniting and defining the population. This turn to the United States is...