Man's House Research Articles

Chinese Business in the Making of a Malay State, 1882-1941: Kedah and Penang (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Business in the Making of a Malay State, 1882-1941: Kedah and Penang Neil Khor Chinese Business in the Making of a Malay State, 1882-1941: Kedah and Penang Wu Xiao Aun Singapore: NUS Press, 2010; 271 pp, index. ISBN 978-9971-69-496-8 (Paperback) George Town, the capital city of Penang state in northwestern Malaysia, is dotted with Western-style mansions. Some have been converted into business premises, whilst others have been demolished to make way for high-end condominiums. Only a handful survive in their original state with large lawns, and not many house the original families that built them. They were built to make a statement. Locally known as 'ang mor lau' (literally, the white man's house), these were more social-climbing 'statements' than homes. Seldom revealed is how these families were able to pull together so much wealth to build their houses and what effects their business activities had on the host communities that made them rich. Who were their business partners and how did they contribute to the economic basis of Malaysia's early industries? This book by Wu Xiao Aun, Professor at Peking University and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Chinese Overseas, first published in 2004, is one of the most lucid accounts of the rise of Chinese family businesses, their networks and their activities in Penang and Kedah. In the process of uncovering the workings of family businesses, the central thesis of the book is about the catalytic role these families played in the 'making' of a Malay state. Obviously, there are questions that immediately come to mind. Is the lens of family history, no matter how intricately described, able to shed enough light on the complex process of the emergence of a 'Malay state'? What is the definition of a 'Malay state', especially when applied to the Kedah sultanate, the oldest Malay-Muslim sultanate in Malaysia with roots going back to pre-Islamic times? Whilst it is undeniable that the businesses built up by these Chinese families are inextricably bound up with the emergence of a legislative framework, infrastructure and administrative system that we have come to identify with the 'modern state', is this the whole story? To a certain extent, the book attempts to answer these questions by way of charting the various stages of the evolution of Chinese family businesses roughly corresponding to the various phases of British intervention in Kedah. Whilst the relationship between Chinese traders and the Malay aristocracy predates Western colonialism, the presence of the British in Penang did strengthen the middleman position of the Chinese, especially if the latter were British subjects. Nonetheless, this business relationship was beneficial to the Chinese as well as their Malay aristocratic counterparts. In fact, the basis of the wealth of the Choong family, for example, was based upon the special relationship between the Choong patriarch Choong Cheng Kean and his patron, the Raja Muda of Kedah. [End Page 115] The British not only tolerated, but encouraged, the Chinese to strengthen this intermediary role as they were the buffer between expanding British commercial interests and the 'modernizing' Malay state. In the case of Kedah, there was a further complication as all parties had to take into account the role of Siam(modern Thailand) as Kedah's overlord. There were three sources for the capital the Chinese families accumulated through their business activities, intermediary role and special relationship with the Kedah aristocracy. The most valuable was paddy destined for Chinese-owned rice mills in Penang; secondly, an assortment of revenue farms ranging from the lucrative opium & spirits to gambling & pawn-broking; and finally, tax collection and money lending. Wu's exhaustive use of colonial records and, more importantly, his mining of family records add new dimensions to this often-told tale. We see the same process at work with Yap Ah Loy in Kuala Lumpur, albeit the Yap dynasty did not grow as influential as the Lim, Choong and Phuah families in Kedah. More interestingly, after each of these families made their money in Kedah, they moved to British Penang, using the latter as their base and access point to the global marketplace...

The Nuclear Family versus the Men's House? A re-examination of Mundurucú Sociality

It has been posited that in communities with residential men's houses there is perforce no nuclear family. This position is examined with reference to the published data on the Mundurucú of Central Brazil. Comparative data are also examined from Oceania and elsewhere. The conclusion is that the two institutions do indeed co-exist in the Mundurucú case.

Syntactical Structure of Genitive Case in AZERI and PERSIAN Languages

Syntactical Structure of Genitive Case in AZERI and PERSIAN Languages

Chief Seattle's Speech Revisited

Chief Seattle's Speech Revisited Arnold Krupat (bio) I Indian orators have been saying good-bye for more than three hundred years. John Eliot's Dying Speeches of Several Indians (1685), as David Murray notes, inaugurates a long textual history in which "Indians . . . are most useful dying," or, as in a number of speeches, among them the one I will consider here, bidding the world farewell as they embrace an undesired but apparently inevitable exile or demise.1 Unlike traditional condolence oratory as, for example, performed by Iroquois and Tlingit people, these elegiac speeches are responses to specific occasions, usually demands for land; they have been addressed not so much to other Indians as to whites who have shown themselves keenly interested in preserving and circulating them. Whereas the speeches of dying Indians were useful in the seventeenth century for the purpose of advancing the gospel, by the eighteenth century, as Murray writes, "dying Indians offered comfort within a different frame of reference, that of inevitably doomed nobility. The focus, therefore changes from ordinary Indians to Indian leaders" to "chiefs" or, as J. B. Paterson insisted in his preface to Black Hawk's autobiography of 1833, to Native American "heroes." Murray goes on to show how, after the American Revolution, "in an increasingly bourgeois society," the "popularity of surrender . . . speeches by Indians" is "acted out [as] the renunciation of power by a nobility."2 By the mid-nineteenth century, this conflict of classes is largely overridden by the discourses of "scientific racism" and "manifest destiny."3 These discourses instantiate a national narrative of progress in the comic mode.4 "Noble" or not, the "savage," comically or, from his perspective, tragically, had to go. [End Page 192] These farewell speeches (those of Black Hawk, Cochise, Chief Joseph, and Chief Sealth), like the protest speeches referenced by Murray, are also "contextually over-determined," with the various contexts perceived very differently by whites and Indians producing an oratorical discourse of considerable complexity.5 II Chief Sealth or Seattle was born about 1786 at Old Man House, the winter village of his Suquamish (the name means "people of the sheltered salt water") nation, on Bainbridge Island in what is now Washington State.6 His father, Schweabe, was Suquamish, and his mother, Scholitza, was a Duwamish woman from the area of present-day Kent, Washington. Sealth is said to have attained chiefly status as a result of his initiative in defending his people against an attack from upriver tribes, the sort of career success expected at one time or another for a young man of his noble lineage.7 There are various monuments to him in Seattle and the state of Washington, but his national and international renown derives from a speech he is usually said to have given in 1854 or 1855. This speech was not published until October 29, 1887, when it appeared in the Seattle Sunday Star in a translation version by Dr. Henry A. Smith. It was reprinted a few years later in Frederic Grant's History of Seattle, Washington (1891), then reproduced in publications by Clarence Bagley and Roberta Frye Watt in 1931 and by John Rich in 1932. Bagley, Watt, and Rich all added a thirteen-word conclusion to the speech as it had originally been printed in 1887: "Dead did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds."8 Sealth's speech was later "retranslated" "from the Victorian English of Dr. Henry Smith" by William Arrowsmith in 1969 and subsequently rewritten and expanded by Ted Perry in the early seventies for a film he had been commissioned to produce for the Southern Baptist Convention.9 The speech was once again altered for the Spokane Expo of 1974.10 It is only the 1887 text that is relevant to the present study.11 Sealth's speech, as I've noted, is frequently said to have been delivered either in 1854 or 1855 during meetings convened by Isaac Ingalls Stevens, the newly appointed governor of Washington Territory, with the aim of persuading the Puget Sound Indians to give up most of their lands in Kitsap County for a reservation at Port Madison. As the historian Carole Seeman...

Marxist/Feminist Models in the New Guinea Highlands

ABSTRACT The widespread existence of men's houses in Highland New Guinea raises the question as to the existence of the nuclear family in this area. We know that in some cases (e.g. the ‘Sambiah’) a married couple co‐reside, despite the fear of the woman's alleged pollution. In others there may be symbolic isolation of the nuclear family, e.g. by subclassification in kin terminology. The matter is especially important in current kinship studies, wherein Marxist and ‘radical’ feminist models of sociality, which tend to see the nuclear family as a sort of Western aberration, abound.

The Poetics of the Crocodile: Changing Cultural Perspectives in Ambonwari

ABSTRACT Ambonwari people from the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, had a rich repertoire of song‐dances, each of which was associated with specific events and the birth of something new. Together they represented the entire human life cycle as well as the cosmology at large. Visual, verbal and tactile modalities of singing and dancing were tightly interwoven; images and symbols were enacted by the dancers, in their decoration, arrangement, movements and in the whole ceremony and were firmly situated in their landscape. Accordingly, song‐dances were also an important practice in male initiation ritual. The first song‐dance of the ritual was the crocodile song‐dance. This article analyses different transpositions of images and meanings which can be decoded from the dance, from the objects that were part of the initiation rite, and from the parallelism and rich allegory of verses. These transpositions operate at different levels until they converge upon the existential facts of birth and death. In the new millennium and under the influence of a Catholic charismatic movement, however, Ambonwari broke off their relationships with spirits, abandoned the men's houses and stopped talking about male initiation ritual. Along with other traditional song‐dances the crocodile song‐dance has been taken over by the song‐dances of the Holy Spirit. These changes in social and cultural perspectives, which are still taking place, are at the same time products and producers of the changes in their relationship to ‘space’ and ‘time’ which are at the same time changes in visual and auditory perception and expression of their life‐world. All these changes should not be seen merely in some abstract or symbolic terms but as tangible processes generated by people's action.

Melting Hearts of Stone: Clarence Darrow and the Sweet Trials

Detroit seemed to Dr. Ossian Sweet a good place to launch a medical practice in 1921. Ossian Sweet understood racial violence all too well. Growing up in Orlando, Ossian had witnessed a large crowd of whites running a black boy down a dusty road. Seeing racial hatred in its ugliest forms instilled in Sweet a deep race consciousness and determination not to let bigotry prevent him from achieving his own personal goals. He decided to move into his new home at 2905 Garland, whatever the risks to him and his family. Clarence Darrow associated with many causes over his long career, but the most constant of all was that of black Americans. From his early identification with the sacred cause of abolition to his charitable support of the NAACP, Darrow always stood out as one of the Negro's best white friends. On the evening of September 9, with the occupants of the Sweet house huddled together a crowd gathered, then increased, stones came through the window and shots came from the house and two members of the crowd lay on the ground wounded, one mortally. After presenting his seventy witnesses, the Prosecutor would tell the jury that the case was simple: Leon Breiner, peacefully chatting with his neighbor at his doorstep enjoying his God-given and inalienable right to live, is shot through the back from ambush. You can't make anything out of these facts but cold-blooded murder.... Darrow wanted the Sweet trial to be about more than the events of one night in Detroit. He wanted the trial to be about a history of black suffering in America. Clarence Darrow wanted the jury to understand the fear felt inside 2905 Garland on the night of September 9. Through a series of defense witnesses, Darrow presented a very different version of the scene. This essay details the trial that resulted first in a hung jury and mistrial. After the second trial resulted in a verdict of not guilty Darrow told the press, The verdict meant simply that the doctrine that a man's house is his castle applied to the black man as well as the white man. If not the first time that a white jury had vindicated this principle, it was the first time that ever came to my notice.

沖縄人の自問自答 ―知念正真「人類館」再考

沖縄人の自問自答 ―知念正真「人類館」再考

Houses in Lesu: The Historical Anthropology of a New Ireland Society

This historically inclined study examines features of habitation and domestic symbolism originally encountered in fieldwork in New Ireland in 1929-1930 by Hortense Powdermaker. It aims to reconstruct important aspects of early social life with a focus on houses as mundane institutions and expressive devices. The examination concerns the organization of shelter into continuous groups and social communities. Men's houses and women's houses stood out as symbolic topoi, each evoking a main cultural modality. The respective iconic narrations of these two possible worlds offered radically different solutions to the existential problem of continuity.

House, fire, gender

ABSTRACTIn this article I examine the Samburu house (pastoralists, northern Kenya) and its fire as the sacred locus of right moral practices—as feminine objects consecrated through proper use. I begin by way of counter-example, however, describing the moral entailments of a particular event, a woman's house that caught fire in contentious circumstances. Following this elucidation of houses made sacred or desecrated through use, I will conclude with a discussion of the Samburu house in relation to Samburu understandings of “modernity.” Here, I will point out the re-gendering of the Samburu house in the wake of an intriguing trend—the accelerating proliferation of the “modern” house that has frequently become a man's house in a society for which the house has long been a quintessentially feminine space.

From stories to material culture: European scholars in the Arctic. HIMMELHEBER, Hans, 2000 Where the echo began: and other oral traditions from southwestern Alaska, Recorded by H. Himmelbert, translated by Kurt and Ester Witt, edited and Annoted by Ann Fienup-Riordan, Fairbanks, The University of Alaska Press, 224 pages Larsen, Helge, 2001 Deering: a men's house from Seward Peninsula, Alaska, Copenhagen,

From stories to material culture: European scholars in the Arctic / HIMMELHEBER, Hans, 2000 Where the echo began: and other oral traditions from southwestern Alaska, Recorded by H. Himmelbert, translated by Kurt and Ester Witt, edited and Annoted by Ann Fienup-Riordan, Fairbanks, The University of Alaska Press, 224 pages / Larsen, Helge, 2001 Deering: a men's house from Seward Peninsula, Alaska, Copenhagen, National Museum of Denmark, Dept. of Ethnography: SILA, the Greenland Research Centre, Ethnographical Series 19, 145 pages. / MARY-ROUSSELIÈRE, Guy, 2002 Nunguvik et Saatut: sites paléoeskimaux de Navy Board Inlet, île de Baffin, Hull, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Archaeological Survey of Canada, Mercury Series 162, 199 pages.. Un article de la revue Études/Inuit/Studies (Tchoukotka) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Chapter 5

The present study used archival data to examine the differential growth among self-governed substance abuse recovery homes for men (N = 443) and women (N = 125). The number of these homes increased dramatically across the U.S. from 1988-1999 when state loan funds were made available to states and technical assistance was utilized by organizations developing the houses. State loan programs and the utilization of technical assistance, however, had the strongest impact on the expansion of women's houses compared to men's houses. The implications of these findings in relation to the scarcity of recovery options for women are discussed.

Social Identity and the Yup'ik Eskimo Village Tunnel System in Precolonial and Colonial Western Coastal Alaska

Some western Alaskan coastal prehistoric and protohistoric village sites had intrasite semisubterranean passageways that connected the village men's house(s) and the smaller family houses. These tunnels acted as an interstitial and negotiated space that connected the gendered spatial spheres of Yup'ik Eskimo women and men. Instead of examining a newly constructed space that may have transformed relationships, this work examines the historically contingent consequence of the loss of these tunnels as a built medium, both between women and men and among women. It is my contention that the dismantling of the multipurpose village tunnels insulated women from one another, from their established methods for learning and means for building influence and authority, and from intimate engagement with the expanding mercantilist economy and equitable access to social and economic resources.

Hunter-Gatherers of the North Pacific Rim (review)

Reviewed by: Hunter-Gatherers of the North Pacific Rim C. Melvin Aikens Hunter-Gatherers of the North Pacific Rim. Junko Habu, James M. Savelle, Shuzo Koyama, and Hitomi Hongo, eds. Senri Ethnological Studies No. 63. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2003. 277 + iv pp. This volume is made up of selected papers from academic sessions and public symposia held in Aomori, Japan, 21–25 October 1998. The Aomori conference followed [End Page 383] sessions at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka and preceded additional sessions in Hokkaido, each part of the traveling Monbusho International Symposium "Foraging and Post-Foraging Societies: History, Politics, and the Future." The editors introduce the book in a chapter titled "Complex Hunter-Gatherer Studies in Japan and the North Pacific Rim." Thence, it falls out in three parts: "Evolutionary Changes in Hunter-Gatherer Cultures: Theoretical Perspectives"; "Pacific Rim Hunter-Gatherers in Different Environments: Ecology, History, and Diversity"; and "Jomon Hunter-Gatherers at Sannai Maruyama and its Vicinity: Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in Northeastern Japan." The editors aptly trace the genealogy of this collection back to Affluent Foragers, published in 1981 as volume 9 of Senri Ethnological Studies (Shuzo Koyama and David Hurst Thomas, eds.). Following up on that beginning, the key themes variously explored by the different authors of the present volume are long-term change in hunter-gatherer sociocultural complexity and cultural variability in relation to environmental and historical contexts. Sites and localities from Okinawa to northern California figure in these discussions. Beginning Part I, Ben Fitzhugh discusses the evolution of complex hunter-gatherers on the Kodiak archipelago. He traces out a trajectory from colonization and expansion about 7,000 years ago to a subsequent advent of territoriality and reduced foraging ranges. This was fostered by mass-harvest fishing technology after about 4,000 years ago, and led on to increased population density, competition and the emergence of social inequality by about 2,000 years ago. Serious competition and warfare by about 1,000 years ago, and a consolidation of political power and social inequality within the last few centuries, lead up to the ethnographically known situation. William Prentiss and James Chatters follow Fitzhugh. They characterize in broad fashion the evolution of socioeconomic systems on both the northwest coast and interior parts of North America, envisioning an explicitly selectionist dynamic. As they read the evidence, an early array of diverse subsistence-settlement systems—mostly of the foraging type—was decimated by severe pressures of Neoglacial cooling about 4,000 years ago. The economies that survived this period of selective stress were logistically organized collector systems, which then flourished with ameliorating climate after about 3,500 years ago to spread the logistically organized and socially complex systems that have characterized the region ever since. It is an appealingly reasonable and straightforward perspective that can help focus much further investigation. Part II of the volume, which addresses the considerable cultural diversity that exists within the fairly homogeneous North Pacific environmental zone, appropriately begins with a paper by Peter Schweitzer. His thoughtful account, focused on the higher Beringian latitudes, demonstrates that there is yet reason to take account of cultural tradition and continuity (amidst our current preoccupation with ecological and sociocultural models) if we are to fully understand the uneven distribution of social inequality along the edge of the North Pacific. James Savelle and George Wenzel follow with an insightful interpretation of Thule social structure in the eastern Canadian arctic that also weaves together ethnographic, archaeological, and environmental considerations, but in a different way. Their task, which they accomplish very well, is to relate the social institutions of the Inuit whaling crew leader and men's house to the structuring of corporate groups in the eastern Arctic. The paper is both theoretical and concrete, anchored with reference to variably complex community patterns seen among eight Thule period archaeological sites on Somerset Island. The last three papers of Part II work with geographical extremes of the region under consideration. Carolyn Dean Kuhn Dillian uses obsidian source data to reexamine an old ethnographic question about territorial relationships among the Karok, Modoc, and other tribes of northern California. In adducing substantial geochemical evidence that the Modoc, rather than the [End Page...

Muti murders form South Africa: A case report

In Southern Africa, human body parts are sometimes used for medicinal (muti) purposes. The human body is seen as being very powerful. Although ritual killing for this purpose is not common, some cases have been reported. This paper reports on an unusual muti murder, where the remains of two individuals were found in a medicine man's house. Three pots were found, two of which were constructed around human skulls. Various objects, such as coins, bullets, stones, human and animal bones were found inside the pots. They were decorated with beadwork, whistles, skin bangles, etc. Osteological analysis revealed that the human remains probably belonged to a young, white adult male individual, and a juvenile individual of Negroid descent. All associated objects probably have ritual significance, and some of these are discussed.

Reading Hebrew Literature: Critical Discussions of Six Modern Texts (review)

edited by Alan Mintz. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003. 258 pp. in English; 38 pp. in Hebrew. $60.00. Reading Hebrew Literature, edited by Alan Mintz, is an exceptionally instructive and useful volume the teaching of evocative contemporary Hebrew texts of both prose and poetry. Mintz has artfully brought together the original Hebrew texts; English translations, some of which he has evidently commissioned specifically this volume; and three interpretive essays each of the respective works, written by leading American and Israeli critics. texts under scrutiny are The Heifer, by M. J. Berdyczewski, translated by William Cutter; To the Sun, by Saul Tchernichowsky, translated by Robert Alter; The Sense of Smell, by S. Y. Agnon, translated by Arthur Green; Man's House, by U. Z. Greenberg, translated by Harold Schimmel; Bridal Veil, by Amalia Kahana-Carmon, translated by Raya and Nimrod Jones; and Hovering at a Low Altitude, by Dahlia Ravikovitch, translated by Chana and Ariel Bloch. The Heifer is a gruesome tale about a group of butchers in an Eastern European town who epitomize in the most essentialist manner the brutality inherent in their profession. William Cutter views the story as part and parcel of anti-idealistic debunking of Judaism. Ann Golomb Hoffman expands the rubric of her interpretive hermeneutic to encompass psychoanalytic issues of gender, most notably, the history of Jewish male feminization -- a fashionable topic of both psychological and ideological import -- which Hoffman views as being adumbrated boldly in story. third essay on the Red Heifer is by Avner Holtzman, one of the world's leading Berdyczewski researchers. Holtzman views the story as connected with peculiar declaration of his intent to memorialize a Judaic culture that comes across as neo-pagan in a good many of stories and in his novel Miriam as well. Holtzman is a bit too quick in giving the appearance of dismissing or minimizing the fact that for generations of readers, this story was viewed as an expression of belief in the potential powers of earthly life hidden beneath the surface of diasporic meager existence, waiting their fulfillment. Proto-Zionist or not, the story The Heifer seems to embody a dynamic re-mythicization of Judaism, which may indeed run counter to avowed pessimism about Judaism during this period (1905). It is surprising that none of the authors saw fit to cite Dan Almagor's masterful study of archetypal figures and situations in work, one small facet of which is Almagor's illustration of the eroticism implicit in the color red in what he terms Berdyczewski's personal mythology. (See Almagor's article in Nurit Govrin's edition of Selected Articles on Literary Work.) second text studied, Tchernichowsky's To the Sun, is a corona or wreath of sonnets -- in which the last sonnet in the cyle is composed of the first line of each of the fourteen previous sonnets -- and is generally acknowledged to be one of the more complex works of the Tehiyyah, the modern Hebrew renaissance period (1880-1920). master linguist and translator, Aminadav Dykman, provides fascinating parallels in Russian literature, which inspired Tchernichowsky's effort in To the Sun. Arnold Band, following the lead of the critic Boaz Arpali, offers an excellently detailed and probing analysis of the biographical introspective elements in the sonnet cycle. poems translator, Robert Alter, takes issue with Boaz Arpali (and hence differs with Arnold Band, too) in stressing the more intellectual and daring ideological purview of To the Sun. He takes pains to expand the more transparently ideological and historically based subject of sonnet number seven [As I stood between the living and one already dying (What a terrible craft!), a sharp scalpel in my hand] to encompass the entire cycle. …

Secrecy and Cultural Reality: Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men's House (review)

Secrecy and Cultural Reality: Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men's House (review)

'A Man's House is his Art': the Walker Art Center's Idea House Project and the Marketing of Domestic Design 1941-1947

'A Man's House is his Art': the Walker Art Center's Idea House Project and the Marketing of Domestic Design 1941-1947

The Brown Boy Loves the White Man

When the brown boy remembers the white man applying Clinique All About the Eyes to the bags beneath his own, he also remembers the fluid is pink. The brown boy does not need Clinique, but he feels that the ritual of a wash, then Clarifying Lotion, Multi-Vitamin Acne Treatment (precautionary), Total Turnaround Cream, Moisture in Control, and maybe All About the Eyes, is more than enough to keep his face cinematic. But beyond product, the brown boy remains beautiful because he gets plenty of rest in the white man's house. One weekend, while napping, he thought about the word comfort and how his body fit perfectly against the white man's: snuggle me is how he gets his white man to do it, to pull him in against his big body, a warm pocket, warmer than the electric blanket's heat, radiating through the water of the king size bed. In the bathroom, the brown boy leaves a small spot of blood from his face on a big white towel. He hopes the white man does not think the stain is shit. The brown boy once told the white man he found it offensive that he left out dark towels for him to

La Saga du kava, du Vanuatu à la Nouvelle-Caledonie (review)

Reviewed by: La Saga du kava, du Vanuatu à la Nouvelle-Calédonie Dorothée Dussy La Saga du kava, du Vanuatu à la Nouvelle-Calédonie, by Annabel R Chanteraud. Collections Îles et Archipels, no 29. Bordeaux: CRET et DYMSET, 2001. ISBN 2-905081-40-6; 288 pages, figures, tables, photographs, appendixes, notes, written in French. €35. This "saga" of kava (Piper methysticum) is a revised PhD dissertation in cultural geography. This plant, cultivated only in Oceania, is famous for the particular properties of the drink extracted from its crushed and diluted roots—muscles loosen and a psychic state generally characterized by a peaceful detachment is created. In this work, Annabel R Chanteraud recounts the history of the consumption of kava in Vanuatu, and also in New Caledonia. She begins with precolonial history, when kava consumption was strictly regulated, reserved for the men, and confined in nakamal (men's house). She traces that history up to the present, when in the city as well as in the villages everyone can drink kava. The author has conducted lengthy fieldwork—administering survey questionnaires, engaging in participant observation, collecting statistics, and consulting the available literature. Chanteraud first presents a review of the literature on mythology related to the appearance and domestication of kava in Vanuatu. The various myths associate the birth of kava with that of the human societies in these islands. For the author, the mythology connects kava with the history of the settlement of the islands and the political development of these societies, corresponding with waves of Polynesian migration. The social rules of Vanuatu society, based on sexual dualism and the egalitarian sharing of tasks, can be read in the rites of preparation and consumption of kava that accompany significant social events. More widely, the history of consumption of kava provides a good vantage point from which to draw out the different elements of the history of the country, from what preceded first European contact to recent struggles for independence. In their aim to acculturate these colonized societies, the nineteenth-century missionaries restricted the consumption of kava, even to the point of total proscription on certain islands. That is why, beginning around 1910, the consumption of kava became a symbol of resistance to oppression. In the cities of Luganville and Port [End Page 459] Vila, it was the elders who first began to drink kava; they were followed by the youth, who had previously not consumed it. Urban kava bars offered a peaceful place where participants could weave together and tighten links among people from the same islands. Confirming kava's political uses, in the late 1970 s minister and independence leader Walter Lini held up kava as the agent of national reconciliation. Under the banner of reviving custom, he placed kava at the center of agricultural and economic planning. The government of Vanuatu promoted large-scale cultivation and also democratized the consumption of kava. This led to the opening of numerous places of consumption. Today, both cities in Vanuatu count an increasing number of such places, ranging from small, district nakamal (open only to men), to large, downtown kava bars (open to the public). The author next investigates the economic market for kava. The various fields of production, the techniques of cultivation, the fluctuations in the price for kilos of fresh kava roots and for cups of kava, and the profitability and stability of the market are described and analyzed. Possible medicinal outlets, as well as the creation of a seal of quality, are also discussed. Using New Caledonia as an example, Chanteraud dedicates the last part of her book to a description of how kava consumption has been exported beyond the borders of Vanuatu, with mounting success. At first, kava was prepared by and for ni-Vanuatu emigrants settled in Noumea; now it is consumed by increasing number of inhabitants of New Caledonia, both Oceanian and European. Thus, according to the author, kava drinking can be seen as a transcultural urban rite. It is necessary to note some deficiencies in the maps and source references in the book. Some maps (such as those on pages 17 and 215 ) lack scales and north/south orientations. Myths are not usually placed in...