TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 505 can enhance and clarify this solid foundation of research. As Hosier indicates but cannot explore due to lack of data, understanding the social organization involved in acquiring metal, manufacturing it lo cally, and controlling its access and distribution in West Mexico is critical to this study. Who became metalworkers? Who controlled metal production over time, the consumers or producers? How were the metalworkers supported and what were their roles in their com munities? Answers to these questions require careful archaeological field work to augment the bounty of data already presented. S. Terry Childs Dr. Childs is an archeologist with the National Park Service and a research collab orator at the Conservation Analytical Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution. Her re search interests include African iron and copper production and North American native copper. Eldoret: An African Poetics ofTechnology. By Richard M. Swiderski. Tuc son: University of Arizona Press, 1995. Pp. xv+228; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth). Richard Swiderski is an anthropologist who lived for two years in the city of Eldoret, in the western highlands of Kenya. The book is a reflection on his and others’ use of native technology. In it he seeks to explain the social definitions of local technologies, includ ing their histories, ethnic and gender configurations, and the politi cal and economic contexts in which local technology develops. Ifone imagined Swiderski’s findings in catalog form, it would con stitute a lengthy tome indeed. Yet the book is an essay of moderate length that uses often unconventional subjects to suggest meanings and their interconnections. For example, he devotes an entire chap ter to a discussion of the handmade wheeled toys made in Eldoret. These are model cars and buses that boys push along rough terrain. They range from a “wheel on a stick,” which even an impoverished boy can make from a discarded oil filter, to elaborate wire models with details, decorations, and functional steering. Boys make them without adult supervision, and often they cooperate with each other to solve material or design problems. Swiderski asserts that the cars “are the boys’ attempt tojoin the motion that links town and country ... [I] ngeniously formed with modest materials, the toys allowyoung men a motion they hope some day to realize more fully” (26). He suggests how technology serves the socialization process, teaching both idealized adult roles and the more relevant skills involved in making something out of discarded materials. Much of Swiderski’s essay describes conventional topics of third world ethnography. These include the organization and accomplish ment of handmade technologies (a chapter on moletraps traces the 506 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE history of pest control in the context of patterns of ethnicity and divisions of labor) and the troubled relationship between these tech nologies, which are improvised, unregulated, and based on complex skills, and the technologies of factories, formal business, enclosed stores, and other manifestations of “modernity.” The handmade technologies are the realm offundi, tradesmen and craftsmen who fix or make parts by cutting metal, welding, sewing, or fabricating a wide variety of materials. The fundi exist on the fringe of the city, in open markets that are demolished as city officials try to build a society of formal businesses and stores. I found Swiderski’s interpre tation of this old theme to be particularly telling, including his de scription of the particular hand, eye, and other body skill which ma nipulates the technology of the culture of Eldoret. Swiderski explores subjects by “cutting across categories.” He shows how something as simple as grazing a cow, for example, mani fests social and economic arrangements between different ethnic groups. Or, he uses the concept of an “ecology of passages” to ex plain how people cooperate to accomplish complicated things, like fixing a loaded truck with a broken axle. Flowing water is related to human traffic patterns. Discussion of signs in the city gives way to a discussion of the role of images in the culture generally, and then to a discussion of the way in which photography is accomplished and consumed, and the meanings that photographs have in Eldoretan culture. His approach is subtle and suggestive. One gains the sense...