Michael M. J. Fischer. Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. 477 pp. This compendium of reworked essays by one of America's most prominent anthropological theorists offers a fair overview of the author's thinking from the mid-1990s onwards. However, the general focus of the book can be traced to ideas spawned a decade earlier, and especially to a School of American Research conference that resulted in the landmark 1986 collection, Writing Culture (James Clifford and George Marcus, eds.), and to Marcus and Fischer's own Anthropology as Cultural Critique published the same year. Fischer's new book is divided into four general domains of inquiry. These are: 1) Emergent Forms of Life; 2) Critique within Technoscientific Worlds; 3) Subjectivities in an Age of Global Connectivity; and 4) New Pedagogies and Ethics. Within these general areas, Fischer moves easily, as a kind of Vasari of American anthropology, exploring what we may roughly call postmodern theory. This he does by reference to an astonishing number of authors, and to a range of topics that no single reviewer could effectively critique. These topics include everything from xenotransplantation (specifically the use of animal organ donors for humans), to art and medicine (especially clinical practice as performance art), to the culture of Cyberspace (both forms of virtual reality and networks of power), to new filmic genres (particularly in emerging transnational settings). Though but a partial list of territories explored in this adventuresome book, the array of topics is not as bewildering as one might think, and readers are advised to study carefully the book's wonderful index. In every case Fischer highlights the importance of what he calls the of anthropology-that is, the within which anthropologists develop the translation and mediation tools for interpreting a world dominated both by multicultural concerns that are centrifugal (and sometimes discontinuous), and by global forces that are polycentric (at times both homogenizing yet multiply situated). In such a world (or, perhaps one should say, in such worlds), networks create separate yet centralizing systems of uniformity, while an acceptance of cultural diversity demands an acknowledgment of multiplicity, if not an acceptance of degrees of fragmentation that can border on the chaotic. Anthropology, then, offers interpretive clearings (to use the anthropologist Michael Jackson's metaphor), or meaningful spaces (to use Fischer's). In these spaces anthropologists thickly describe the dynamic, fragmented forms of contemporary life that simultaneously can integrate and disintegrate social and human identity. In fact, it is precisely the surprising and ironic juxtaposition of cultural practices caused by speeding global activity that results in the unlikely, if not fragmented, social circumstances we now call postmodern. Here, descriptive forms of ethnography (especially those pioneered by Clifford Geertz [following Henry James]) can productively unravel the ironies and odd juxtapositions that make life in the late twentieth century seem so different. The creation of such anthropological spaces, in turn, allows Fischer to think more positively about the world and about anthropology's role in it than so many others who write about the paralyzing impact of science and technology on increasingly global and culturally diverse social spaces. Interpretation, therefore, makes possible new sensibilities because spaces are, within this confusion, creative settings where the result of an unlikely superimposition is the creation of some new, third thing. Thus, for Fischer at least, the postmodern is seen less as the outcome of modernity's failing faith in social progress-of continuous global development, of purposive social growth-than as a way of distinguishing a period during which a consciousness about life's discontinuities leads to a conflation of experiences that, in his own words, once were separated by time and space (181). …