WOOD, John C, WHEN MEN ARE WOMEN; Manhood Among Gabra Nomads of East Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999, 240pp., $49.95 hardcover/$19.95 softcover. This book is an ethnographic account of the nomadic pastoralists who inhabit an and area of Kenya, along its border with Ethiopia. Their livelihood comes mainly from raising camels, sheep and goats, though some Gabra have been educated and have found paid employment since colonial times. Analytically, the work is complex and multi-layered. The topics it touches include parent-- child relations in a paternally focused nomadic society, marriage and the intricacies of gender. The discussion of gender is linked to broader intellectual debates about the relationship between gender and sex, particularly to discussions which have centered around cultures whose gender classifications include categories not solely determined by the possession of male or female reproductive organs. The Gabra are such a society, insofar as some senior men, the d'abella, after they have passed the stages of life defined by warriorhood and political power, assume some of the symbolic trappings of femininity and are defined as women for various ritual purposes. Wood argues, probably sensibly, that multiple genders, or gender switching, whatever fuzziness they may introduce into binary conceptions of sex and gender, achieve their symbolic impact precisely because the cultures in which they are found assume that, for most purposes, sexes and genders come in twos. Perhaps of less immediate interest to readers of this journal, the discussion of gender is part of extended deliberations about duality, subjectivity and other issues raised by contemporary critiques of anthropological structuralism. Although the complexities of Wood's arguments cannot be adequately discussed in a short review, it is fair to say that he asserts that the Gabra do think in oppositional terms, if only to use binary classifications as a framework for meditating on the exceptions to duality posed by the ambiguities of daily life. Current discourses about the writing of ethnography are not slighted either. Although Wood writes in the ethnographic present, he is careful to warn that that present should only be understood to encompass the first half of the 1990s, when he did his fieldwork. Though the subjects of the study are mostly described collectively as Gabra, the author does include two individual life histories, one of a respected elder, the other of a marginalized young alcoholic, employing a style of interlocutory reportage popular in recent anthropology. …