Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=raan20 Asian Anthropology ISSN: 1683-478X (Print) 2168-4227 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raan20 Book Review Lynne NAKANO , James E. ROBERSON , Kinnia Shuk-ting YAU , Samuel Gerald COLLINS , WANG Danning , Anru LEE , Veronica MAK , CHEN Hua , J. Lawrence WITZLEBEN , Steve DERNÉ , Nupur PATHAK , William JANKOWIAK , Anthony R. WALKER & Jennifer ALEXANDER To cite this article: Lynne NAKANO , James E. ROBERSON , Kinnia Shuk-ting YAU , Samuel Gerald COLLINS , WANG Danning , Anru LEE , Veronica MAK , CHEN Hua , J. Lawrence WITZLEBEN , Steve DERNÉ , Nupur PATHAK , William JANKOWIAK , Anthony R. WALKER & Jennifer ALEXANDER (2010) Book Review, Asian Anthropology, 9:1, 143-183, DOI: 10.1080/1683478X.2010.10552599 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2010.10552599 Published online: 25 Sep 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 68 BOOK REVIEWS Tough Choices: Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Japan. By Ekaterina HERTOG. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2009. 228 pp. Reviewed by Lynne NAKANO In Japan, the age of marriage is rising, fertility rates are falling, families are shrinking, cohabitating couples and single-person households are on the rise, and the divorce rate has caught up with Western countries. In contrast to these changes, the percentage of unwed mothers has remained low, both in comparison to previous decades, and in comparison to other industrialized countries. Ekaterina Hertog's book sets out to explain why. One of Hertog's notable findings is that even unwed mothers had highly conventional views of marriage. The majority of unwed mothers in her sample had tried and failed to secure the two-parent family model. This finding supports Hertog's claims on the importance of norms and beliefs in shaping childrearing choices. Hertog effectively compares the Japanese case with a study of low-income unwed mothers in the United States among whom rates of births outside wedlock are high. Hertog points out that among low-income mothers in the United States, expectations of mothers' responsibilities are lower, abortions are considered morally suspect, and marriage is viewed as a luxury. This contrasts with Japan, where expectations of mothers are high, having children outside of wedlock is considered "egoistic," and marriage is viewed as a necessary condition for a "normal" family. The book is comprehensive in its coverage of issues related to unwed motherhood and contains intimate stories that Hertog elicited from in-depth interviews with unwed mothers. The book covers contraception and cohabitation practices, and alternatives to having a child outside wedlock such as adoption and abortion. Hertog also discusses unwed mothers' treatment under Japan's legal and welfare systems, and unwed mothers' views of these systems. The book is theoretically driven, as it explores some of the leading theories used to explain unwed motherhood trends in Japan as well as in the United States and Europe. Hertog examines and dismisses these theories one by one. The "social contagion theory" (p. 6), for example, 144 Book Reviews used to explain the rise of cohabitation and children born outside wedlock in European countries, argues that the more women choose to cohabit in any given society, the easier it becomes for other women to make this choice. Hertog notes that this theory may explain a trend once it begins, but does not explain the lack of change, as in the case of unwed motherhood in Japan. Hertog demonstrates that many theories can be dismissed because they do not explain why the divorce rate has risen in Japan but the rate of unwed motherhood has not. The "economic approach" argues that Japanese women do not choose to have children outside wedlock because of the economic disadvantages they would face after their child is born. Hertog asserts that although a Japanese single mother is rarely able to achieve an income equivalent to that of an average male earner, these theories predict that few women would divorce their husbands for the same reason. Instead, as mentioned, the divorce rate has risen steadily in recent decades. Moreover, recent improvements in the welfare and the legal systems in Japan have not resulted in higher rates of unwed motherhood. Hertog similarly dismisses the "ideational approach," which holds that the disappearance of traditional family values and rising affluence has led to the rise of individualism and greater variation in family forms. She points out that this theory does not explain the difference in divorce and illegitimacy trends in Japan. Hertog examines theories arguing that social stigma and shame are particularly important in explaining unwed motherhood in Japan. She argues that although stigmatization and shame contributed significantly to reinforcing the norm of childbirth within marriage in Japan in the past, its importance has been decreasing. She found that young women were less concerned with stigma and shame than older women, yet there has not been a change in trends of childbearing outside marriage. After dismissing these other arguments, Hertog proposes that guilt may be the primary factor that keeps women from having children outside wedlock. She argues that women continue to be shaped by beliefs in the importance of a two-parent family, complementary parental roles, and the malleability of children. Because of these beliefs, failure to provide children with a two-parent family creates feelings of guilt among unwed mothers. The argument that guilt shapes women's childrearing decisions is convincing. To suggest that guilt is the main explanatory principle behind unwed motherhood, however, requires a strong explanation of why divorced women are not affected by guilt. Book Reviews 145 Hertog argues that divorced women have tried the "ideal" family form and found it to be unsatisfactory, while unwed mothers tend to hold on to idealized images of two-parent families. She writes, "In sum, divorcees could think about their marriage and parental roles more realistically having had the experience of marriage, whereas women who were never married based their perceptions on ideal role fulfillment" (p. 148). But to prove that guilt is the main factor, we would need to have a better understanding of the cases of divorced women, and women who decided not to have a child outside wedlock. Hertog does not provide such evidence. In my view, in setting up and criticizing other single-variable explanations, Hertog falls into the same trap, and is unable to sufficiently explain the difference between rates of divorce and childbirth outside wedlock. I also wanted to know more about how Japan compares with other industrialized Asian societies such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong with relatively lower rates of unwed motherhood. Although I was not convinced that Hertog needed to single out guilt as the primary factor behind women's decisions, I found Hertog's book to be an excellent study of unwed mothers' perspectives and social conditions. It contributes to a growing body of studies that explore changing Japanese families, and demonstrates how ethnography can enhance understanding of family formation and life choices. Lynne Nakano is Associate Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her e-mail address is lynnenakano@cuhk.edu.hk Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa. By Christopher NELSON. Duke University Press. 2008. 277 pp. Reviewed by James E. ROBERSON In Dancing with the Dead, Chris Nelson weaves together, in ethnographically detailed and intellectually erudite but readable fashion, a series of narratives on the potentially transformative, interventionist, dialogic articulations of collective memory, cultural performance and the everyday in contemporary Okinawa. 146 Book Reviews Over the past several years, as Nelson notes, there has been much written on "the politics of remembrance" (p. 179) in Okinawa, including contestations over commemorative sites, the Himeyuri student-nurses, the re-collection of individual war-related testimonies, and so forth. However, little work has focused on how Okinawan memories are given expression in cultural performance and production. For Nelson, it is in cultural performances that the everyday becomes alive with memories of the past-of ancestors and ancestral homes-and thereby enlivened with complexly composed transformative potentialities, both in the present and for the future. In the Introduction, Nelson charts some of the complexities of the "battlefield of memory" that characterizes contemporary Okinawa. Nelson examines Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryūtarō's attempt to merge the distinctiveness of Okinawan historical experience with that of Japan, thereby obfuscating the responsibility of the latter for the past and present horrors experienced by Okinawans. At the same time, Nelson reminds us that the Okinawan past is also "a reservoir of possibility" (p. 4). Through the work of Okinawan scholars and performers, the appropriative disciplining of the Japanese state is dislocated and "in the authenticity of voice and gesture, something of the past is brought forward into the now, recovered from loss, and used to reinvigorate the moment" (p. 18). Nelson discusses the performative practice of Fujiki Hayato as performer (chapter 1) and as instructor (chapter 3). Fujiki's storytelling is informed by Okinawan and Japanese cultural, intellectual and performative resources, and is linguistically playful, critically reflexive and inspiringly thoughtful-and entertaining. In chapter 1, Nelson's description revolves around a performance at the Nakamurake villa-cum-museum in central Okinawa, where "the audience confronts the contradictory spatiotemporalities of Ryūkyū and modern Japanese Okinawa" (p. 34). Among others, Fujiki tells a story of an older Okinawan man narrating to his young grandson the experiences of Kerama islanders caught between Japanese and American military forces during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. Nelson argues that "Fujiki's performances are profoundly political, articulating an ethical practice configured around a politics of hope ... in the transformative powers of the past" (p. 57). In chapter 3, Nelson focuses on a seminar on Okinawan culture and history Fujiki conducted that emphasized a practical, experiential approach, and in which Fujiki wanted students to think about the Book Reviews 147 consequences of Japanese domination as well as to "sharpen [their] sense of contradiction by focusing on current events, culture, and history" (p. 95). Fujiki here is concerned with recognizing Okinawan contradictions, nonsynchronism (p. 102) and heteroglossia (p. 107), as well as the possibilities for action and intervention. Such are shown in Fujiki's skit, "pōku tamago" (spam and eggs), which recounts the protagonist's memories of the December 1970 Koza Riots (p. 125). Nelson notes that "playing on the rhythms of everyday life to create a moment for reflection and creative action, [Fujiki] showed us that we could resist the constraints and the complacency of the modern world...." (p. 125). In chapter 2, Nelson introduces the "ethnographic storytelling" of Teruya Rinsuke, one of the most recognizable and important popular cultural figures in postwar Okinawa. Influenced by Onaha Zenkō (Būten), who combined mastery of traditional Okinawan art forms with their comical overturning (p. 78), Teruya studied traditional Okinawan performance genres, as well as history and ethnography (including minzokugaku folklore studies). Teruya's narratives dealt with Okinawans' cunning uses of their distinctive, "chanpuru" (literally, to mix) hybrid culture/rhythm to manipulate their relations with powerful Others. He developed a performance style resembling that of a folklorist's lecture (p. 65), through which he manipulated "the conventions of minzokugaku [folklore studies] in order to locate a sense of agency for the Okinawan people, and explore their culture as a powerful resource for operating in the modern world" (p. 58). In Chapter 4 ("In a Samurai Village"), Nelson interweaves a reading of a poem by Takara Ben, discussion of traditional Okinawan mortuary ritual practice, and an analysis of the testimonies of Okinawan antiwar landowners at public hearings on American military base land use. What ties these together, and links them with other chapters, is the figure of the yādui village of the déclassé Ryūkyūan nobility (samurai). Here, the yādui becomes a "synecdoche for life in contemporary Okinawa" (p. 135) as places of loss and as places lost. These losses include those of Ryūkyūan monarchical decline and of the deprivations and hardships of Okinawan incorporation into Japan. The yādui themselves are places lost through such incorporation, the devastations of war, and expropriation for American military base use. However, in Takara's writing and in the anti-war landowners' testimonies, the yādui are recovered and deployed as hometowns in order to critique Okinawans' unwilling displacement from their ancestors and ancestral homes. 148 Book Reviews In chapter 5 ("Dances of Memory, Dances of Oblivion"), Nelson focuses on the eisā drum and dance performance of the Sonda neighborhood of Okinawa City, describing its postwar reinvention and arguing that eisā performers "narrate and embody the history of impoverished Okinawan courtiers ... express and sustain the pride and honor of these neighborhoods ... and ... create and share karī, the gift of happiness and belonging produced in performance" (p. 180). The Sonda community hall connects the eisā performers with the local ancestors, the building's construction evoking family tombs and the photographs displayed and conversations carried on inside recalling performers and performances past. In dancing the eisā, Okinawans create a space in which "other possibilities exist ... new choices are made legible, and the possibilities of transformative action are explored" (p. 213−214). In this, the eisā performers and audiences join Fujiki, Teruya, Takara, the antiwar landowners and others in dancing with the dead to remember the past, live in the present and imagine the future. I cannot do justice here to Nelson's complex interweaving of ethnographic description, historical and cultural detail, and theoretical interpretation. Though his writing is clear, this is not a book for beginners. For readers with knowledge about Okinawa, there is much both familiar and new. For readers less familiar with Okinawa, especially students, this will be a harder read-though worth the challenge. While alternative readings, broader ethnographic contextualization, or less extensive theoretical exegesis might have been possible, Nelson's arguments are forceful, informed and insightfully drawn. One hopes that he will continue to focus on the cultural richness of everyday life in contemporary Okinawa, complementing and complicating other writing. James Roberson teaches anthropology at Tokyo Jogakkan College. His e-mail address is roberson@m.tjk.ac.jp Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building. By Tze-Yue G. HU. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2010. 217 pp. Reviewed by Kinnia Shuk-ting YAU Tze-Yue G. Hu's book presents a study of the historical development of anime, a name describing animation produced in Japan, putting it in the Book Reviews 149 context of Japanese traditional art and aspects of Japan's society and culture. The book charts the early development of anime, examines representative anime artists, and discusses the influence of anime in Asia and attempts to explain why other Asian countries have yet to establish animation industries that can match the scale and popularity of that in Japan. Anime has attracted scholars of different disciplines in recent years, and research on various dimensions of the topic is abundant in the literature. What makes this book different from existing works is how Hu approaches this popular cultural product. She chooses to start her investigation of anime by focusing on the underlying desires that motivates the art of animating. She suggests that anime can be considered as a form of visual language by which Japanese people seek "self-understanding, self-projecting and self-expression" (p. 18), and that it represents a much more flexible and powerful medium for expressing both personal and social desires than the Japanese language. Hu focuses on examining Japanese traditional art as well as artistic influences from Western cultures, tracing the origin of anime by referring to various characteristics possessed by different art forms. The book goes on to examine Japanese traditions and cultural elements, and in particular highlight the indigenous religion of Shintoism, putting forward the idea that anime has been used as a means of image-building by Japanese, especially in the post-war period. Putting anime in the context of Japanese traditional art forms and culture is appropriate because, as in the case of any cultural artifact, having a broader perspective toward the historical and cultural background that nurtures it is essential in comprehending its essence and uniqueness, thus paving the way for explaining its characteristics and popularity among diverse audiences. The book attempts to connect the dots between Japanese traditional art forms and different anime projects. However, the links are in many cases only briefly discussed, and are usually not clear enough, especially judging from the fact that a full chapter has been dedicated to reviewing the different forms of Japanese traditional art. In addition, given the profound influence of Shintoism on the Japanese people, one expects more discussion of the relations between its religious beliefs and some characteristics that are unique to Japanese animation. A contribution of the book is its description of the development of anime in its early days and subsequently after the Second World War. 150 Book Reviews An understanding of its origin is essential because such a story tells how this popular art form came into prominence and what forces were at play. The detailed descriptions of the early parties in the industry and especially of the partnership between the two worldrenowned animators, Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao, give a well-organized summary of the history of anime. In addition to putting together existing materials in the literature, the descriptions are also enriched by first-hand information from personal interviews conducted by the author herself. Focusing on Miyazaki and Takahata may be inevitable when dealing with the history and development of anime. However, emphasising the roles and works of Miyazaki and Takahata makes the rest of the wide spectrum of anime fall outside the focus of this book. The duo's works, although admittedly representative and having contributed to the international fame of anime, arguably represent only a few genres of anime. The Japanese animation industry is also well known for its creativity in illustrating, for example, romance and adventures in medieval settings, futuristic worlds, and supernatural forces. While some of these kinds of works have been mentioned in different places throughout the book, one cannot help but wonder what might be said about the wider variety of anime by following the same line of thought and treatment in this book. The last chapter of the book gives some valuable insight into why other Asian countries have failed so far in establishing a solid ground in the animation industry. On the one hand, Japanese anime obviously holds certain characteristics that appeal to a wide audience. On the other hand, as Hu suggests towards the end of the book, animation produced in other Asian countries exists in the combined shadow of their Japanese and Western counterparts, and very often fails to express a true identity and uniqueness. Despite my relatively critical review of this book, it makes some significant contributions to the understanding of anime as an art form that is unique to Japan. In answering the research questions posed by the author in the introductory chapter, the book also opens up quite a lot of interesting directions for anime research. In particular, it touches on some topics such as the social and political environment as well as economics, including, for example, the social phenomenon of otaku and its significance in sustaining the anime industry, the relation between the strong economic growth in Japan before the bursting of the bubble economy and the high demand for various forms of entertainment, and the complex web in which different forms of popular culture such as Book Reviews 151 comics, anime and hobby merchandise are entangled. These topics are clearly important aspects that one should look at when examining anime. Kinnia Shuk-ting Yau is Associate Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her e-mail address is kinniayau@cuhk.edu.hk South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society. By Jesook SONG. Duke University Press. 2009. 201 pp. Reviewed by Samuel Gerald COLLINS In 1997, after months of reassurances about the health of the economy, South Korean President Kim Young-sam stunned citizens by going to the IMF for one of the largest bailouts in history. In the wake of this "second national day of shame" (the first being the date of the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910), Kim Dae-jung, Korea's foremost dissident, prepared to assume the presidency. At first critical of what he viewed as an effort at economic colonization, he eventually embraced the IMF's program, and with it the structural adjustments that would bring devastating levels of unemployment and social dislocation. The challenge for Kim was to implement IMF policies designed primarily to palliate creditors while still retaining support of the pro-democracy activists who formed his base of support. He did this in part by creating what Jesook Song calls a "neoliberal welfare state," i.e., one which utilizes social welfare policies as a technology for the creation of neoliberal subjectivities. There were many critics of Kim's capitulation to the IMF; part of the success of his political vision lay in the co-optation of at least some of these social activists in a series of partnerships between government agencies and NGOs. In this important addition to the growing literature documenting Korea's tumultuous "IMF era," Jesook Song counters those who see Korea's neoliberalism as signaling the weakening of the state. Instead, as she writes, "Productive welfarism was on the same continuum as the developmental state in that the governing strategies were still seeking prosperity through the enhancement and exploitation of labor power" (p. 137). Song's ethnography takes as its starting point not the machinations of the state, but the actors at the margins of state programs, 152 Book Reviews those activists and intellectuals whose programs helped both to cushion the social dislocations of IMF policies while at the same time helping to create a flexible, pliant workforce for the global, neoliberal order. Returning to Korea for her dissertation research on social activism, Song was immediately confronted by an economic crisis that had severe consequences for her informants, people who supported their activism with precarious part-jobs that evaporated in the credit crunch that followed the 1997 bailout. Over time, these same activists became embedded into the Kim administration's social welfare policies-in particular, with institutions charged with managing homelessness and unemployment. At the core of Song's research is the idea that, whatever else they accomplished, these institutions were also part of the armature of neoliberalism, sorting and conditioning a "self-managed" workforce. She begins with an examination of the Seoul city government's partnerships with the church-based "Homeless Rehabilitation Center" and its efforts to sort and classify homeless persons into "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. In the "undeserving" category were the "purangin," people supposedly habituated to homelessness and thus ineligible for government-subsidized work programs. Entering the "House of Freedom," an old textile factory re-tooled for social services, these "rootless" homeless could be separated from the "deserving" homeless, those people who, according to the city government, might be fully employed were it not for the vicissitudes of the IMF. Those selected could move on to the "House of Hope," a more independent facility offering training and work opportunities. But how to tell the "IMF homeless" apart from the "rootless" homeless? As Song notes (p. 45), there was considerable ambiguity in deciding who was "unemployable" and who was eligible for "rehabilitation". Ultimately, decisions about who constituted the "deserving" homeless were based on conservative visions of the family and of gender. For example, benefits were almost exclusively targeted towards men to the exclusion of homeless women, who bore the stigma of being a priori "undeserving" because of their purported failures to fulfill their Confucian duties as daughters, wives and mothers. This was part of an overall strategy that sought to undermine women's modest gains during the 1990s by creating a two-tiered labor system relegating women to part-time and temporary positions. The other way people were sorted into "deserving" and "undeserving" was by age and social class, with young, middle-class and collegeBook Reviews 153 educated "new intellectuals" becoming the ideal recipients of government welfare programs. At the core of President Kim's policies was the goal of erecting a technocratic state on top of the older, heavy-industry-dominated developmental state. That meant an emphasis on IT, on flexibility, and upon a "creative class" able to create new opportunities for venture capital investment. "Self management" and "self-cultivation" became the guidelines for college students, who undertook endless classes in private institutes in order to procure certification in software languages and applications together with skills in foreign languages-anything to maximize their "flexibility" and emphasize their technological skills. Song herself was part of this process, through her involvement with the Seoul City Committee for Unemployment Policies (SCCUP). Initially opposed to policies transforming youth into a flexible (and expendable) labor force, Song and the other researchers she worked with eventually "decided to use the discourse of 'creativity' and 'new intellectuals' as a means to legitimize unemployed young people as viable subjects of new presidential projects" (p. 104). That is, whatever their misgivings about the creation of a reserve of flexible labor, they eventually adopted neoliberal discourse, if only for the access it gave them to resources for underand un-employed youth. What emerges in Song's account is a period of "second nation building" founded on the formation of a social class system with highly differentiated access to resources, and the creation of a sweeping, neoliberal classificatory system upon which future profits might be built. Accordingly, Song ends on a somber tone, noting that "the very foundation of liberalism is discursively, politically, and economically engineered to conceal the multiple coordinations behind capitalist production: wage labor, primitive accumulation, the invisible hand, civil society, local autonomy, and individual freedom" (p. 139). But this strikes me as at once too little and too much. On the one hand, too little: the Kim Dae-jung administration placed neoliberal discourse at the core of statemaking-well beyond the differential provision of welfare benefits, the very survival of the nation itself has putatively rested on the wholesale adoption of neoliberal discourse and institutions. The success in co-opting otherwise critical social activists derived at least partly in the popular identification of IMF structural adjustments with neo-colonizing forces, particularly those originating in the United States. But on the other hand, it's also too much. South Korean pro-democracy activists were variously embedded in occasionally 154 Book Reviews contradictory narratives of nationalism, ethnic identity, North Korean unification and even anti-globalization. Suggesting that the kinds of liberal reforms fought for during the 1980s and 1990s were inevitably co-opted into neoliberal regimes minimizes those activists who continued to critique government policy throughout the IMF era and elides the complex and even refractory qualities of Korean social movements. It would have been interesting to read of other actors who ended up less complicit in the neoliberal welfare state. Samuel Gerald Collins is Professor of Anthropology at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. His e-mail address is scollins@ towson.edu The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work. By Miliann KANG. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2010. 309 pp. Reviewed by WANG Danning With how much of that thing that we call "culture" can a fingernail be loaded? Miliann Kang's newly published ethnography The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work demonstrates that understanding the increasingly popular manicuring business, particularly as performed by Koreans in the United States, can help us decipher the sets of cultural rules that regulate the daily lives of urban people throughout the post-industrial world. The finance-centered service industry has replaced manufacturing as the dominant commercial activity in major strategic urban locales around the world; Kang's ethnographic work reveals the increasing role of "body labor" in maintaining and fulfilling this newly predominant service industry. "Body labor" as Kang defines it, "entails extensive physical labor in which the body serves as the vehicle for performing service work, but it also incorporates the body as the site or object upon which services are performed. It also involves the management of commercialized feelings ... and thus examines feelings as they are related to the servicing of bodies" (p. 20–21). Thus, "body labor" incorporates services performed on or to the body, and for the body, of the customer. However, the term "body labor" refers not only to the body of the Book Reviews 155 customer, but also the body of the service provider, for the labor is performed with, and the services delivered by, the service provider's body. Furthermore, the service provider must perform this labor and deliver these services with the "proper" attitude so that the customer's "internal" psychological needs can be ultimately satisfied and the notion of her own body elevated to the status of an ideal. From the beginning, the relationship between American customers and Korean manicurists is hierarchical, and there is limited opportunity for the female service providers who perform "body labor" to alter these social dynamics. After all, in the manicuring business, such services as the painting of nails and the massaging of hands are actually proxies for something deeper and of a more existential nature-embodiments of intimate cultural significance and vehicles for responding to internal questions such as "who am I?"; "what value do I derive from this activity?"; "what does it mean to be nice/feminine/independent/professional/black/Korean/"; and, finally, "how can I change or improve my life and the lives of others?" Kang's ethnography is a detailed record of an employment market reconfigured along lines of gender, race, class, global migration, and rules of body culture in the post-industrial metropolitan world. This reviewer thinks of this book as consisting of three different interrelated discussions. There is first the book's theory (Introduction and chapter 1). Here, Kang introduces the concept of "body labor," which becomes the foundation of her cultural analysis of the emerging manicuring business. Using a structural analysis of the capitalist postindustrial economy, Kang situates the manicuring business "on a continuum with the buying and selling of other body-related services" (p. 247), in which the body and body work are commodified and private and intimate spaces and activities are commercialized. The painting of the fingernails is no longer an intimate act that is shared between close friends, mothers and daughters, or sisters. Just as fewer American women are cooking meals from scratch, cleaning their own homes and yards, and taking care of their own children full-time, they are also increasingly turning to outside labor to tend to the more intimate care of their own bodies. As a result of this development, domestic and body work have become an ever greater proportion of the post-industrial service industry. This trend of commercializing emotional and intimate services highlights the ultimate paradox of the service industry-can money buy love? To what extent should customers believe that the 156 Book Reviews service workers who provide this "body labor," these emotionally charged and intimate services, genuinely care for them as human beings and not as the interchangeable recipients of routinized procedures? From the manicurist's perspective, the question becomes, how much of her own intimate feelings and personal dignity should she invest in her work beyond the time and labor necessary to complete it? There is also the book's consideration of the lives of the Korean manicurists (chapters 2, 4, and 6). Kang explores the manicurists' immigration background; their gender roles in their patriarchal families and social groups; their concerns as business owners and employees; their class and racial relationships with their customers; the discipline that they apply to their work; and their negotiation of "politics" in the workplace, as well as the role of labor rights and labor organizations. Kang's keen ethnographic efforts and powerful analytical capabilities knit these various strands together and provide readers with a fascinating overview of the daily lives of these manicurists in the context of contradictory social stereotypes of Asian-Americans as both the model minority and the new yellow peril. The collective agency of the manicurists becomes a crucial factor to their survival in this negative, if not hostile, social and working environment. In order to transcend the invisible class and racial boundaries that result in inequality, individual manicurists find it necessary to view the services they provide as something beyond a mere "personal indulgence" or a "ritual of bonding between women." They find power in organizing protests to demand legal protection for themselves and their fellow service workers. There are also the American customers (chapter 3 and 5). It would be easy for these chapters of the book to devolve into biased descriptions of obnoxious service buyers. With critical sophistication, Kang steers away from this trap, instead revealing how individual customers are themselves actually the victims of the commercialization of "beauty ideals propagated through corporate advertising and media" (p. 245). She demonstrates how the customers seek care for their "marked" and stigmatized bodies through adornment and alteration. By receiving these intimate services from skilled service providers, customers hope to recover and be cured through the pampering delivered by the manicurists' tender hands and their solicitous conversations about family and work. What makes Kang's work truly shine is her pointed statement regarding the ministrations of body laborers as personal and individual solutions to larger societal problems. While searching for private Book Reviews 157 solution to the injustices in their own lives by employing the services of manicurists, these customers end up reinforcing a system of social inequality. Therefore, they lose the capacity to "transform social structures that inhibit women's power" (p. 246). Kang's great accomplishment in this work is the bird's eye view that she provides of the manicuring business. By revealing how "body labor" has been created and used in this most recent stage of capitalism, she reminds readers how easily we all, both customers and providers, can fall into a new game designed to exploit our emotional needs and yearning for intimacy. WANG Danning teaches anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her e-mail address is danning_wang@yahoo.com Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan. Edited by Fang-long SHIH, Stuart THOMPSON, and Paul-François TREMLETT. London and New York: Routledge. 2009. 218 pp. Reviewed by Anru LEE Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan is a collection of essays that arises from the continuing efforts of the Taiwan Research Program at the London School of Economics to critically examine the state of Taiwan studies. The editors indicate that there has been a tendency in the past few decades-if less so now-to perceive Taiwan as "a sign or simulacrum of an imagined, traditional Chinese culture" (p. 6). This representation, however, is problematic because it ignores the unique socio-historical and cultural development of Taiwan separate from China. The chief objective of this volume, therefore, is to reconstruct and re-imagine Taiwan as a place in its own right and context and a contested site of human social actions and interactions. This objective is best comprehended against the background of the development of the anthropology of Taiwan in the 1970s and the 1980s. The essays in this volume can, by and large, be categorized into two groups depending on the author's academic training and his/her take on the issue of re-writing. The first group of essays is primarily written by anthropologists who approach re-writing, and, by extension, critical reflection of past 158 Book Reviews literature, as their scholarly task at hand. This is illustrated in Fang-long Shih's essay on "Re-writing Religion" (chapter 1). Shih postulates that although British and American anthropologists tended to treat Taiwan as a surrogate of China between the 1960s and 1980s, lately scholars have been increasingly aware of the processes of modernity, urbanization, globalization, and localization that shape contemporary Taiwanese society. Drawing on her own research and writing on maiden ghosts, Shih shows how the writing of Taiwanese religion is changing, with more attention being paid to the dynamic nature of religious belief, practice, and identity within ever-transforming social, political, and economic contexts. Paul-François Tremlett offers in his essay "Re-riting death" (chapter 2) a critical re-reading of the past anthropological representation of death rituals in Taiwan and argues that these rituals are not structured by a bygone imperial bureaucracy, a conception of the cosmos, or a kinship system, but shaped by the modern Taiwanese state susceptible to current processes of globalization. This re-contextualization helps bring to light a renewed understanding that the dead as a site in contemporary Taiwan is "not for the social reproduction of 'tradition' or 'Chineseness' but for the social reproduction of a global secularism" (p. 37). By the same token, Stuart Thompson examines the range of ways in which education in Taiwan has been represented in Western anthropological as well as other scholarly writings in his essay "Re-writing Education: 'Learning to be Taiwanese?'" (chapter 9). These three essays may at times concentrate too hard on a narrowly defined problem that seems more exemplary of the anthropology of Taiwan a few decades ago than at present (as pointed out by Shih in her essay). I found "Writing Indigeneity in Taiwan" (chapter 5) by Scott Simon, also an anthropologist, more illuminating. Simon asserts that "writing indigeneity is inherently political, and that the choice of discourse should be a conscious one" (p. 53). He has to confront the fact that the writing of Taiwan is deeply entangled in the fierce contention over national identity-the question of whether Taiwan is Chinese (p. 52). Simon's decision to represent the Sejiq/Taroko, the aboriginal population with whom he works, as an "indigenous nation" but not a "Chinese ethnic minority" is thus a conscious one, with significant political implications. His choice helps to connect the struggle of Taiwan's indigenous activists with the global social movement of indigenous rights, and puts the issue of indigeneity in Taiwan in a global, comparative light. The second group of essays in this volume is not written with the Book Reviews 159 anthropological literature of Taiwan in mind. These essays focus more on writing about the present than providing an alternative interpretive framework. In these essays, "re-writing" refers to the act undertaken by various sectors of the Taiwanese populace as well as of the government to (re)define Taiwan's past history in their attempt to take control of the current discourse of Taiwan's national identity and thus its political future. In this light, "re-writing" is not a scholarly practice but rather a subject of scholarly analysis, a point meticulously articulated in Mark Harrison's "Writing Taiwan's Nationhood" (chapter 6). Among the essays in this second group, Edward Vickers' "Re-writing Museums in Taiwan" (chapter 4) focuses on two sets of interrelated questions: How have museums participated in, or responded to, recent identity politics in Taiwan? And, in turn, to what extent has the nature and function of museums as institutions changed? (p. 73) Felix Schoeber's "Re-writing Art in Taiwan" (chapter 8) offers a brief overview of Taiwanese contemporary art in the past two decades and points out contradictions in the construction of modernity in Taiwan. Henning Kloter's "Re-writing Language in Taiwan" (chapter 5) traces the construction of a "Taiwanese language" within the contexts of Taiwan's colonial past and current and ongoing debate about its political belonging. Chris Berry argues in his essay "Re-writing Cinema" (chapter 7) that, in spite of the consistent attempts of the government to shape Taiwan cinema based on a national cinema model, throughout the course of history Taiwan cinema is actually a "public sphere" where different ideas of the nation and/or the national are engaged, presented, and confronted. Taiwan cinema as an industry is today increasingly integrated into and dependent on a globalized film economy, and the growing rhetoric of national sovereignty and national political and cultural self-sufficiency in Taiwan is in contradiction with the global reality that Taiwan is now facing (p. 151). Overall, this book is a worthy effort in its attempt to advance the current state of Taiwan studies. However, while individually each of the essays contributes to a renewed understanding of Taiwan studies, jointly these essays do not come together as a coherent volume. Re-writing as an issue is dealt with in all of the chapters, but with varied approaches; authors of essays in the second group I have identified adopt diverse theories to investigate their subject matters. More significantly, the question of national identity is in the foreground in nearly all essays. This raises a question which might undermine the editors' conviction about 160 Book Reviews the purpose and impact of this volume. Given the highly volatile and contentious political atmosphere in current Taiwan, how could any keen observer not reflect on the nature of Taiwan as a culture, a society, or a polity but continue to accept the premise that Taiwan is "a simulacrum of an imagined, traditional Chinese culture"? Anru Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York. Her e-mail address is alee@jjay.cuny.edu Where There are Asians, There are Rice Cookers-How "National" Went Global Via Hong Kong. By Yoshiko NAKANO. Hong Kong University Press. 2009. 214 pp. Reviewed by Veronica MAK This book deals with the globalization and localization of cooking technology in relation to migration, Chinese entrepreneurship and social change. Yoshiko Nakano tells us how National-brand rice cookers developed in Japan, were localized for the Hong Kong market and then went global following Asian migrants around the world from the 1950s to the 1980s. Against the backdrop of popular Japanese heroic tales of commercial success, Nakano attempts "to examine the globalization of 'Made in Japan' products from a less Japan-centric perspective" (p. 176). Based on oral history interviews with forty-three individuals, including William Mong and his staff at Shun Hing Group in Hong Kong, as well as employees at Matsushita in Japan, through a time-span of seven years, supplemented by archival research, Nakano finds that the key to success for "National going global" was the collaborative approach adopted by National/Panasonic and the "archetypal" Hong Kong entrepreneur William Mong. The introductory chapter sets forth the core argument of the book, describing how National, and Japanese appliances at large, went global via Hong Kong. Nakano argues that the role of Hong Kong as a free port for re-export was particularly important "at a time when protectionist trade policies were the norm. Japanese appliances ... followed Chinese traders, travelers, and migrants ... to the Philippines, Indonesia, Book Reviews 161 and the Middle East in the 1960s, to China after it adopted its Open Door Policy in 1979, and to Canada and Australia in the late 1980s" (p. 3). Readers who are interested in material culture, social history and identity issues of Hong Kong will find this chapter exciting. Nakano describes how Japanese electronic appliances signified social mobility, class and identity in Hong Kong. The ownership of rice cookers during the 1960s was a sign of upward social mobility. The conspicuous display of refrigerators in the living room symbolized new social status in the 1970s. The installation of a washing machine in "modern" housing estates with drains in the 1980s expressed filial piety. Nakano suggests that the popular Japanese TV dramas in the 1970s had a significant impact on young people in Hong Kong, as their storylines reflected Hong Kong's own situation-indeed, Nakano discusses "being a Hong Konger through Japanese appliances" (p. 14). She argues that the more young people modernized their lifestyles by purchasing Japanese home appliances, the more they felt they were distancing themselves from being "mainlanders." Readers who are familiar with consumption, identity and social change in Hong Kong may find that it is Japan-centric to focus only on the relationship between Japanese electronic appliances and Hong Kong identity. As many scholars have pointed out, there are other lenses, such as changing foodways, fashion, and housing, through which Hong Kong identity and social change may be understood. In chapters 1 to 3, Nakano explains the motive behind the collaboration between the National rice-cooker team and William Mong: the pressing need for market expansion of National (Chapter 1), but lack of know-how and local insights (Chapter 3) on the one hand, and William Mong's particular trajectory and diversifying strategy to safeguard the family's fortune on the other hand, facilitated this co-operation. Chapters 4 and 5 depict the vital role of Hong Kong in the process of globalization of National electronic appliances to Southeast Asia, China and Canada. Chapter 4 explains how the flow of electronic products from Japan to the Near and Middle East occurred via Hong Kong because they are more affordable because Hong Kong was a free port (having no taxation) and because of the strong bargaining power of Mong. I found the last two chapters to be the most enlightening part of the book. Chapter 6 tells us how the rice cooker has contributed to the global movement of people, who cook rice differently, and enabled them 162 Book Reviews to adapt to new environments. The route through which the globalization of rice cookers has taken place is complex and not all via Hong Kong, but also to Europe via Japan―as early as the 1960s, most Japanese businessmen assigned to Europe carried rice cookers with them. In the 1970s, many Asian students studying in North America and Europe used rice cookers in their dormitories not only for rice-cooking but also, more generally, "as a safe, portable kitchen" (p. 148). In the 1980s, National rice cookers traveled further, to Canada, Australia and other countries, brought by Hong Kong migrants after the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. Another remarkable point that chapter 6 brings to light is that the flow of rice cookers has not been limited to movement from "East" to "West," from home to foreign lands. Many Filipino migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, and many Taiwanese bar hostesses in Japan, bought rice cookers in the country where they were based and then took them back home when they left. Wealthy Korean tourists also brought home the latest model of Japanese rice cookers as gifts. Chapter 7 tells inspiring stories of how 'National' rice cookers added new features creatively, such as cooking tahdig ("crispy rice") for Iran and cake-baking functions for Thailand. However, while providing us details of the diversification and multiplicity of routings and reasons for the flow of rice cookers, Nakano at points contradicts her major argument. As discussed above, there are counter-examples indicating that National went global by numerous paths other than Hong Kong. In addition, although it is true that the localized product features developed in Hong Kong, such as the Cantonese-style congee-making function, are popular in East and Southeast Asia as well as Canada and Australia among ethnic Cantonese, we can hardly say that this represents the "global." Lastly, if the aim of the book is to move away from the Japan-centric and male-centric heroic tale whose central characters are all Japanese men, what Nakano's book has done is to create another heroic myth: William Mong. Emphasizing "making sense the Mong way" (p. 104), Nakano represents Mong as a market hero, who saves National's business in Indonesia through his transnational Chinese network; but the situation was in fact more complicated and nuanced than Nakano's narrative depicts. However, these criticisms have by no means devalued Nakano's significant contribution to the study of food technology, globalization, and the social history of Hong Kong in relationship to Japan. Book Reviews 163 Veronica Mak is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her e-mail address is veronique.mak@gmail. com Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames. By Mei ZHAN. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2009. 240 pp. Reviewed by CHEN Hua Mei Zhan's book is an ethnography focusing on the globalization of traditional Chinese medicine in recent decades, based on her fieldwork in clinics, hospitals, schools, and grassroots organization in Shanghai and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her research focuses on the processes of entwinement, rupture, and displacement in the formation and deployment of knowledges, identities, and communities in traditional Chinese medicine. In Part One, "Entanglement," Zhan discusses the globalization of traditional Chinese medicine and the challenges faced by traditional Chinese medicine in the processes of commodification and encounters with biomedicine. In chapter one, "Get on Track with the World," she traces the multiple, uneven trajectories and shifting meanings of Chinese medicine as a "preventive medicine" and examines the discrepant vision and practices for what emerges from and underscores these trajectories. From the 1960s to the early 1970s, China sent medical teams to the "Third World," especially Africa. Acupuncture in particular was reinvented and praised as "preventive medicine" for the rural poor. In these efforts, China's government vigorously promoted African-Chinese "brotherhood" and China played a role of being at the center of the racialized proletarian world. However since the 1980s, in the age of reform in China, East Asia, Europe, and North America have in a sense replaced Africa as privileged areas for China's effort to "get on track with the world" and for reinventing traditional Chinese medicine. Acupuncture is widely marketed in California as a naturalistic preventive medicine suited for a middle-class, cosmopolitan lifestyle that focuses on overall well-being. Practitioners in Shanghai too have quickly changed their emphases to market new herbal concepts and products to target the emerging middle class. 164 Book Reviews In chapter two, "Hands, Hearts and Dreams," Zhan considers the ways in which processes of commodification and encounters with biomedicine reshape traditional Chinese medicine as a practice of "kind heart and kind skills" (renxin renshu). Treatment of Chinese medicine is often perceived as more holistic and humanistic than that of biomedicine; however, commodification and marketization have complicated the legal status, pedagogy, learning processes and expertise of the practitioners in Chinese medicine. In Part Two of the book, "Negotiation," Zhan focuses on the refiguration of the clinical knowledge and authority of traditional Chinese medicine in globalization. In the face of medical circles dominated by biomedicine, Chinese medicine must reinvent knowledge and practice to negotiate its medical legitimacy and authority. Many traditional Chinese medicine practitioners accept that the authority of biomedicine is based on science; however, some of them may argue over whether or not traditional Chinese medicine needs be proven to be rational and effective according to biomedical criterion. Zhan explores the multiple, competing ways that knowledges and identities are negotiated through the various kinds of networks in which practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine take part. In the book's third chapter, "Does It Take a Miracle?" Zhan explores the phenomenon of "clinical miracles." When arguing for the medical legitimacy of traditional Chinese medicine, practitioners often point out that traditional Chinese medicine is effective where biomedicine is less effective-for example, chronic illness and certain types of cancer-and that Chinese medicine can produce "clinical miracles" to challenge the "death sentences" pronounced by biomedical doctors. Opponents of traditional Chinese medicine argue that such incidents have no statistical meaning and do not meet scientific criteria. Zhan explores "miracles" in Chinese medicine treatment in both Shanghai and San Francisco from her fieldwork and studies how practitioners strategically invoke and interpret these "miracles" in professional and broader sociohistorical contexts. She suggests that it is precisely through the process of its marginalization that the everyday clinical efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine comes to be measured in terms of "miracles." Clinical miracles as sources for medical legitimacy at once mark the marginality of Chinese medicine and disrupt universalist narratives of rationality. In chapter four, "Translating Knowledges," Zhan discusses translational practices in the construction of translocal knowledge and Book Reviews 165 identities. She describes her observation of what exactly is taught and learned in the day-to-day clinical shifts of Dr. Huang Jixian, an acupuncturist who has trained international students since the late 1970s. Dr. Huang explains her practice in traditional terms when interacting with students because, as she and many students argue, "the students are here to learn traditional medicine." But she consistently uses biomedical language when talking to biomedical colleagues visiting from abroad. Zhan pays specific attention to the ways in which knowledge and meanings are produced through these translational practices, and argues that translation is not a neutral medium that bridges existing cultural differences but is rather a set of uneven, contingent processes and practices by which differences are produced and encoded in clinical knowledge and in broader sociohistorical identities. In Part Three, "Dislocation," Zhan examines how dualistic discourses of "East" and "West," "culture" and "science," "tradition" and "modernity," and "local" and "global" are repeatedly invoked and deployed in the everyday practice of Chinese medicine. In examining the ways in which "kinship," "culture," "China," and "America," come to life in practice, she moves toward an analysis of plurality and contingency in the production of difference, as well as an understanding of how specific spatiotemporalities emerge through practices of mapping, temporalizing, and positioning. In chapter five, "Engendering Families and Knowledges, Sideways," Zhan examines a seemingly archaic mode of knowledge production in Chinese medicine-namely, the transmission of knowledge through kinship ties in general and patrilineal descent in particular. Rather than focus on men as the protagonists among knowledge bearers, Zhan discusses the life histories of three Chinese women who entered or left Chinese medicine through kinship ties. She refocuses the question of gender and kinship in Chinese medicine and then turns it sideways to examine the translocal production of difference through family ties and claims to knowledge and authority. Discourses and practices of kinship and gender are as much about continuity and connection as they are about the rupture and alienation that continue to shape Chinese medicine. In chapter six, "Discrepant Distances," Zhan focuses on her ethnographic encounters in the San Francisco Bay Area to explore how to measure the distance between "China" and "America" through the globalization of Chinese medicine. She examines how translocal encounters do 166 Book Reviews not produce a uniform transpacific community of traditional Chinese medicine, but instead provide occasions for making strategic alliances and, at the same time, reproduce and transform existing terms of differences. I have some small quibbles with the book-in chapter five, Zhan argues that patrilineal descent plays a direct role in knowledge inheritance of Chinese medicine, but her evidence is not strong enough. However, all in all, Zhan depicts clearly the trajectories of globalization of traditional Chinese medicine. The author has done a fine job in this book. Her work provides an exemplar of translocal and multisited anthropological investigation for students in medical anthropology. Chen Hua is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Sun Yat-sen University, South Campus, Guangzhou, China. His e-mail address is hsschh@mail.sysu.edu.cn Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow: Chinese Pop Music and Its Cultural Connotations. By Marc L. MOSKOWITZ. Honolulu: University of Hawaìi Press. 2010. 165 pp. Additional materials at http://people.cas. sc.edu/moskowitz/songs.html Reviewed by J. Lawrence WITZLEBEN Despite the ubiquity of Mandarin-language popular song, anthropologist Marc Moscowitz's engaging study is the first English-language monograph on the contemporary mainstream. (Estimable studies of earlier periods include Andrew Jones's Yellow Music, Jones's Like A Knife, and Nimrod Baranovich's China's New Voices.) The title is catchy but misleading: the book's focus is in fact on music recorded in Taiwan, including its impact on the Chinese mainland and beyond. As such, a mention of "Taiwan" or "Taipei" in the title or subtitle would have been appropriate, and its omission is curious, given the author's obvious affection for the island and its people. In Moskowitz's view, this music is "a blend of traditional Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Western musical styles that has transformed into something new and delightful for Chinese-speaking audiences" (p. 3), and he argues that "while less threatening to the PRC state than the overt sexuality and celebration of consumerism that are expressed in U.S. pop, Book Reviews 167 Taiwan has served to export a transnational musical ethos that is remarkably radical in comparison with the state-controlled music industry in the PRC" (p. 3). Themes in the songs include urbanization, changes in society and values, "an increasing sense of a social and moral vacuum" (p. 3), and especially sentiment: "it is clear that songs of sorrow remain by far the most prevalent form of Chinese-language music, and even people who are more interested in alternative music are extremely familiar with the more popular Mandopop songs" (p. 3). The umbrella term for the music used in English-language media is "Mandopop"; Moskowitz adopts this term, but also uses "Gang-Tai pop" to refer to "PRC perceptions" of the music (p. 4). He argues that "Mandopop is the Chinese-language musical genre in Taiwan, and all other musical styles, ranging from alternative to R & B to rock, are subsumed into this larger category" (p.3; emphasis in original), but it is not clear whether this view is shared by most listeners. On the whole, the book is somewhat lacking with respect to definitions of, distinctions among, and consistency of usage for song genres and their names (Mandopop, Gang-Tai, Cantopop, Taiyupop). The heart of the book lies in Moskowitz's translations and discussions of representative songs, juxtaposed with listeners' comments on the songs and the ways in which they relate to their own lives, loves, and aspirations. Moskowitz interviewed 65 individuals in Taipei and 18 in Shanghai, including both "laypeople" and professionals from Taiwan's recording industry. Most were female, college-educated urbanites in their 20s−30s (p. ix).This rich primary data becomes the basis for insightful analysis of contemporary society and personal interactions in Taiwan and China. The author is particularly interested in representations of gender in popular song, and the themes discussed in these chapters (4, 5, and 6) should be of interest to all scholars and students in Asian studies and gender studies, even those who have no affection for Mandarin popular song. While the predominantly female informants provided ample material for a monograph, I cannot help but wonder how the narrative would have changed if it included more men's voices. Do they listen to and enjoy these same songs, and if so, how do their perceptions differ from those of women? Do some males shun this entire repertoire as the aural equivalent of "chick flicks"? Somewhat surprisingly, given that Moskowitz is a professor of anthropology, the biggest disappointment here is the thinness of the ethnography. While it is refreshing to hear the voices of people from the 168 Book Reviews culture being discussed in the foreground of the narrative, it would still have been valuable to include some discussion of methodology and the author's place and role in that culture as a Western, male professor in a world of young Chinese female pop fans. A more serious shortcoming is that we get very little sense of these songs as something people write, sing, record, and listen to in real time, whether in recording studios, on concert stages, in a karaoke lounge, or on one's own stereo, computer, or iPod. In most major East Asian cities, concerts in arenas or stadiums are central to the popular music scene, and it is hard to imagine that live music is either nonexistent or unimportant in Taiwan. A description of even one concert would tell us a great deal about the age and gender of the listeners, as well as the performers' interactions with the audiences, including the languages used (do performers ever use Taiwanese or English?). Similarly, karoke is mentioned only in passing, despite its importance as a site for both music-making and socializing throughout East Asia. Even though the author's main focus is on song texts, it is disappointing to see so little discussion of how the music sounds or the ways in which it resembles or differs from popular song in the West. The occasional quotations from interviews with singers Valen Hsu, Stefanie Sun, and Chang Cheng Yue are extremely interesting, but on the whole we get little sense of the performers as singers (rather than just people who pose for album covers) with distinct personalities and abilities. Some consideration of the musical attributes would have also strengthened the arguments made in Chapter 7 ("Mandopop Under Siege") on behalf of popular music in Taiwan. In places, the book could have benefited from careful editing. We are told that Taiwan's popular music accounts for "80% of Chineselanguage sales in the PRC" (p. 2), but a few pages later (p. 9) the same percentage is cited for Taiwan plus Hong Kong. We read that in the period 1978–89 people in mainland China "could legally buy or copy cassettes brought in from outside, but it was still not broadcasted [sic] on state-controlled radio or television" (p. 20), but are then paradoxically told that "In the early 1980s, people in the PRC could be arrested simply for listening to Gang-Tai pop that was not approved by the state" (p. 22). It is gratifying to see an article of my own cited, but there are three typos (one in my name, two in the title). The author mentions the relevant scholarly literature on East Asian popular music, but rarely seems to have seriously engaged with it. Christine Yano's exemplary study of Book Reviews 169 Japanese enka (Tears of Longing), in particular, might have been a useful model for developing a more fully realized ethnography of an Asian popular music culture. Moskowitz includes a discography of the songs and artists discussed in the book, and a brilliantly conceived website provides complete song texts in Chinese, pinyin romanzation, and English, displayed side-byside with links to videos. My criticisms notwithstanding, Moskowitz's book is well-written, thoughtful, and attractively presented (the photos of CD covers and publicity stills are used to great effect in his analysis). It fills an important lacuna in the English-language scholarly literature on Asian popular culture, and it will become required reading for anyone teaching a class in this area, as well as a useful resource for those interested in representations and perceptions of gender in Taiwan/China and elsewhere. J. Lawrence Witzleben is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His e-mail address is jlwitz@umd. edu Liberalization's Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. By Ritty A. LUKOSE. Duke University Press, 2009. 284 pp. Reviewed by Steve DERNÉ Liberalization's Children is based on more than two years of fieldwork with non-metropolitan, non-elite college students in a provincial town in Kerala, India. While it has some insights, it doesn't live up to the promise of analyzing such students' perspectives. Rather, it ends up focusing more on analyzing the (often extralocal) discourses and institutions these students face. This is too bad because the ethnographic moments described are fascinating and some of the arguments are insightful. Ritty Lukose takes on the urgently important ask of analyzing "nonelite, non-metropolitan" perspectives of young people on globalization and liberalization in India. She's right to see non-elite, non-metropolitan youth as "liberalization's children in their own right." She's right to 170 Book Reviews recognize that it would be wrong to characterize non-elites as simply celebrating consumerism or as contesting changes wrought by globalization. But this important insight confirms the work of many excellent scholars, including Liechty, Saavala, the Osellas, the Jeffreys, Mankekar, and others. This reviewer would have preferred more ethnographic evidence of the interpretations of "liberalization's children." Lukose suggests meanings associated with a young woman's response to the destruction of a garden she constructed in the shape of India, and identifies playful subversions she observed in her hostel-mates' mock fashion show. But these analyses do not build on statements by the college students she studied. Although Lukose lived in a girls' hostel, male college students' voices appear more frequently. In a book on non-metropolitan college students in a provincial town, it's odd that so many quotations come from "a young woman" Lukose met at the Miss Kerala pageant in the capital city. It's odd that so much attention is given to foreign Veejays or to the critiques of beauty pageants offered by lawyers associated with the national BJP party or feminists associated with nationwide Indian women's associations. While popular films give insight into non-elite cultures, Lukose often analyzes them without sufficient reference to how "liberalization's children" actually respond to them. More explicit and timely description of the ethnographic background and methods would have helped situate the study. While Lukose describes the interesting sites in which she did her fieldwork, there is no description of the "long, rambling interviews" she conducted. What were the questions? How did people come to talk about topics, like "the good life"? While the author describes the caste, class, and ethnic/regional background of students at the college she studied, she doesn't address the English-language competency of the people she interviewed until she mentions the issue in the last chapter. There, Lukose references Sunita, a "bright, articulate, English-speaking student" whom she visited in her home, noting parenthetically that "she was one of the few students at the college who spoke fluent English" (p. 179). The last chapter usefully highlights contests over English, but much of the discussion is based on interviews with students fluent in English. I wondered if the reason I had assumed interviews were probably conducted in English and that students were relatively fluent in English was because so many of the people quoted were not the less fluent English speakers one would expect in a study of non-elite, non-metropolitan youth. Book Reviews 171 The book is not well situated within liberalization's trajectory. Lukose's "most intensive period" of fieldwork was in the "mid-1990s," followed by shorter fieldwork stays "over the years." In citing events from 1994 to 2008 (but often not giving the year), the book gives the sense that globalization is a timeless process. Yet, in 1991, cable reached just 300,000 homes in India; in 1999, 24 million homes. In 1990, 9% of the urban population had access to television; in 1995, 74% did. Surely, globalization was experienced differently by those who were college students in 1994 and 2008. (An epilogue suggesting the possibility of changes since the author did her research only confuses the question as the book itself cites events throughout the whole period.) Nor does the book consistently focus on the effects of liberalization. Chapter 3 discusses how "contemporary narratives by young women render education as a space of consumption and desire that is fraught with possibility, aggression and danger" (p. 130). But the practices described-"eve teasing" in colleges, romantic meetings in public places-pre-date liberalization. Chapter 4's discussion of how college strikes render the college yet another space of male sociality similarly is not unique to the post-liberalization period. In the 1970s and 1980s, too, strikes rendered college spaces male and limited women's opportunities to participate. Chapter 5's discussion of non-elite men's feelings that they were threatened by women's success and of the politics of English versus vernacular language similarly, pre-date liberalization. Lukose is right to examine how non-elite, non-metropolitan youth have been influenced by discourses on liberalization, but the author doesn't systematically examine the discourses that might affect them. She highlights Newsweek's "discourse" of "India Rising" and Business Week's narratives of generational contrasts. Describing "the" media's characterization of "zippies"-young people, between 15 and 25 years of wage with a "zip in the stride"-she cites the English-language publication Outlook. But the Newsweek and Outlook articles appeared 10−12 years after the author began her research and so could not have affected the people she was studying. Lukose often cites "journalistic commentaries" in English-language media, like The Times of India and the Indian Express, often involving events in urban centers in metropolitan areas distant from her research. The discussion of these discourses appears haphazard, unsystematic, perhaps selective. Lukose does not examine how the discourses she cites affected vernacular-language media, which would likely have more effect on "non-elite, non-metro172 Book Reviews politan" youth she sets out to study or how liberalization's children actually respond to these discourses. The book takes on the extremely important task of examining "classspecific, caste-specific, and gender-specific constructions of masculinity and femininity" in the face of globalization. So, it's disappointing that the author doesn't explicitly define "class," often refers to classes unselfconsciously and inconsistently, and doesn't benefit from recent cultural analysis reconceptualizing class in the face of globalization. Lukose's recognition that liberalization has "generated contemporary forms of lower-caste and class masculinity that are newly tied to commodity culture" and that this is "another axis of exclusion for lower-caste and lower-class young women" is particularly valuable and should be pursued (p. 13). But the association of class identity with particular gender patterns has been made more cogently by other scholars. Lukose is right to recognize that anxieties about globalization have surfaced in highly gendered politics about women's place, but again this has long been recognized by other scholars focusing on economic and social changes prior to liberalization. Perhaps the greatest value of Liberalization's Children is in its highlighting colleges as sites of the making of young people as citizens and consumers. Her attention to streets, college hostels, classrooms, and icecream parlors is refreshing. It's also refreshing to see the recognition that while market forces "fashion" young people as consumers, educational and political discourses and practices continue to "fashion" them as citizens. Steve Derné is Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Geneseo, Geneseo NY, USA. His e-mail address is derne@geneseo.edu Modern and Global Ayurveda: Pluralism and Paradigms. Edited by Dagmar WUJASTYK and Frederick M. SMITH. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2008. 349 pp. Reviewed by Nupur PATHAK Dagmar Wujastyk and Frederick M. Smith in their exhaustive introduction to this volume unravel how Ayurveda, an age-old Indian indigenous medical tradition, has evolved since the latter part of the twentieth Book Reviews 173 century in its homeland and beyond. The aim of their investigation is to show how the interconnection of Ayurveda with new sociocultural environments has led to threats due to the hegemony of modern medicine and modernity as a whole, and how it met these challenges. To capture this, the editors introduce the concept of "modern" and "global" Ayurveda. To discuss the modern institutionalization of Ayurveda, the editors examine the transformation of traditional Ayurvedic medicine in the process of adaptation during the supremacy of British colonial medicine in India and the search for national identity from the nineteenth century as a form of "revivalism of Ayurveda" (p. 2). They argue that the commercialization of Ayurvedic pharmaceutical healthcare products has played an important role in attracting "foreign tourists and urban, middle-class Indians" (p. 3), and that modernization has transformed Ayurvedic indigenous curative means into a preventive identity marker to tackle problems of modern living styles. At the same time, scholarly excavation of ancient Ayurvedic materials has widened its field of research. From the mid-1960s onward, medical anthropological studies and mass media have enhanced its integration with other disciplines and have led to a combined approach based on modern and global Ayurvedic knowledge. The editors` investigation extends further to deal with Ayurvedic transnational and global approaches and the restrictions they encounter in local and global contexts. They discuss how European medical culture has imposed barriers to the transmigration and adaptation of Indian Ayurvedic tradition, especially on the trading of Ayurvedic drugs. The aim of the editors is to show how the domination of British colonization over Indian indigenous medical traditions has generated the need for modernization in Ayurveda that has brought a revolution in the traditional Ayurvedic academic paradigm, complemented by a search for national identity among traditional Ayurvedic practitioners. The editors also maintain that other factors have played a role in popularizing modern Ayurveda, such as Ayurvedic self-help literature that upholds the voice of women in healthcare practices. All in all, the introduction focuses on how Ayurveda has adapted itself to a new environment and popularized its identity in the world marketplace, and considers how this "acculturated" Ayurveda has influenced the United States and Europe and has been reintroduced to India. The contributors to this volume explore indigenous medical identity 174 Book Reviews in the colonial period, and discuss the institutionalization of indigenous medicinal systems, as well as analyzing the implementation of Ayurveda as an Indian healthcare paradigm in the contemporary era. Wujastyk in chapter 3 shows how the role of Ayurveda in national healthcare policy was restricted due to colonial intervention and national politics. Other chapters focus on various developments in Ayurveda, such as the role of Siddha/Tamil medicine in Indian medical pluralism (Weiss, chapter 4), the resurrection of the traditional values of Ayurveda in North India advocated by the key participants of the Indian national movement at the end of British colonialism, enhancing its strength in the national healthcare system (Berger, chapter 5), and the "pharmaceuticalization" (p. 201) of Ayurvedic medicinal products because of mass-scale production to meet the guidelines of "standardization" (Banerjee, chapter 11). Despite its expansion in a global context, the acceptance of modern Ayurveda is still on a trial basis in the scientific world, Banerjee notes. To overcome the declining status of Ayurveda in India and beyond, she recommends a collaborative approach with biomedical science. As Payyappallimana discusses in chapter 8, research on ethnopharmacology in Ayurveda is contributing to healthcare in India despite variations in botanical identities which complicate the formation of a database. Tirodkar in chapter 13 examines the outlook of Indian urbanities, who have increasingly tended towards modernized Ayurvedic healthcare practices like "day spas and health resorts" suiting their "fast life" (p. 233). She believes that this trend separates them from the traditional cultural values of Ayurveda. Despite this, she argues that the preference for Ayurveda supports the revival of cultural values that otherwise would have been fading away, given contemporary Indian sociocultural dynamics. Meulenbeld in chapter 9 and Alter in chapter 10 explore new dimensions of Ayurveda in the current era, such as the role of Ayurveda in the management of immune deficiency disorders such as HIV and AIDS. Meulenbeld also suggests the need for further consideration of Ayurveda from a psychoanalytical perspective. A major gap in the book's chapters is that they overlook the use of modern Ayurveda by much of the Indian population today, particularly rural people who belong to low socioeconomic status. Despite restrictions being imposed on Ayurveda's inclusion in the biomedical stream, and teaching curriculum, and legal reservations on its practice including its usage in public health, these chapters use a variety of approaches to illustrate the multidimensional processes of integration Book Reviews 175 and adaptation of the Ayurvedic system to different Western societies. Saks (chapter 2) and Chopra (chapter 14) consider Ayurveda as an alternative model in therapeutic management. This can be a challenging paradigm in the United Kingdom, as argued by Pole in chapter 12. Svoboda in chapter 6 discusses the devaluation of Ayurveda; its trend towards "commodification" in the global market is analyzed by Welch (chapter 7), who depicts how global Ayurveda has emerged from its limitations in the Indian Ayurvedic environment. Newcombe in chapter 15 discusses how in Great Britain faith in "transcendental consciousness" (p. 263) has brought about Ayurvedic revivalism. Finally, Jeannotat in chapter 16 and Humes in chapter 17 highlight Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as an active revivalist of Ayurveda; Maharishìs new healthcare paradigm and a detached and streamlined traditional Vedic ideology have created popularized health products in the American marketplace, becoming hotel spa culture. Maharishìs role in propagating current Ayurvedic global ideology in American culture is overemphasized in these last two chapters, which fail to pay attention to Chinese and South Asian influences on the global Ayurvedic paradigm. However, these last two chapters do identify some of the most pressing issues that the Ayurvedic medical heritage is facing at a global level and thus raise an important question of whether globalization is transforming the Indian heritage of Ayurveda into no more than a commodity culture. Overall, this edited book is an excellent compendium, presenting a lucid picture of the non-homogenous nature of the Ayurvedic medical system. Its research and analysis of the modernization and globalization of Ayurveda sheds new light; it emphasizes a development paradigm as a form of innovative sustainable opportunity in modern Ayurvedic healthcare practice in the contemporary world. The book will be of great importance to students and researchers in the fields of medical anthropology and Ayurvedic studies alike. Nupur Pathak was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Charles Wallace India Trust and the Indian Council of Social Science Research; her postdoctoral research is on immigrant Tibetans in India. Her e-mail address is pnupur11@yahoo.co.uk 176 Book Reviews The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan. By Laura ADAMS. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 242 pp. Reviewed by William JANKOWIAK Academic significance often follows a subject's political importance. This is especially so in the case of studies of Central Asian governments, cultures, and societies that have long been embedded within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The nations of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have all sought to define themselves in opposition to one another as much as against being perceived to be still quasi-Russian in style and cultural outlook. In the case of Uzbekistan, what is so fascinating is how the leadership continues to embrace the former Soviet Union's style of leadership and nation-building, especially as applied to the staging of spectacular cultural performances. Laura Adams' impressive account of the rise of the contemporary Uzbekistan state, stresses the continued use of Soviet-Union style political performances, which arises less out of a continued fidelity to Russian culture and more out of a need to establish a distinctive Uzbekistan self-image as an independent nation with a long historical heritage. To achieve this aim, the Uzbekistan leadership looked to their pre-Muslim and Muslim cultural and religious heritage for more salient symbols in which to construct a grand narrative of the country's cultural origins. Unlike North Korea or Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan's political elite rejected the cult of personality organized around the glorification and worship of a single individual. Instead, Uzbekistan's leadership chose to make its ethnic heritage the foundation stone of its national identity. Anthony Smith, Adams points out, long ago noted that the appropriation of a worthy and distinctive past or golden age "performs a number of functions, including satisfying the quest for an authentic identity by promoting a myth of origin, re-rooting the community in a homeland where the golden age took place, [and] establishing a sense of continuity across ages" (p. 4). As in the case of the Mongolian Republic, where Chinggis Khan is promoted as a culturally unifying force to establish a modern Mongolian national identity, the Uzbekistan leadership embraced Amir Timur (or Tamerlane) as the country's mythical hero or father of the new modern nation. Unlike in the case of Hungary, where after the collapse of the communist regime, the statues of Karl Marx and Lenin Book Reviews 177 were removed to a suburban park to be mostly mocked, Uzbekistan replaced its earlier Soviet-era statutes with new carvings and images of Amir Timur. It was a selective embrace of Timur's accomplishments, however. Adams points out that "the military conquests and brutal violence of Timur were de-emphasized, while his architectural achievements, leadership philosophy, Islamic faith, and a patronage of art and science were [given the stronger highlight]" (p. 41). Embracing a historical albeit ethnically-based heritage provided a believable foundation for the establishment of a distinct national identity. Adams, notes, however, that something more was needed. It was also necessary to sell the new image to not only its citizens but to intellectuals and government leaders elsewhere. To this end, the leadership used grand public rituals and massive celebrations as a means to inspire stronger feelings of collective membership and identity. Adams calls this sociological process "spectacle nationalism." Unlike other emergent nation-states, she notes, Uzbekistan's leadership has strived, at a symbolic level, to promote the state's domination via the creation of shared meanings through the production of a shared, albeit newly created heritage. In effect, the ideology of unique cultural heritage was used to legitimate the new regime. Because every effort at nation building can be potentially either a beneficial or a tragic undertaking, exploring how particular ideological themes penetrate and structure a community's political identity can be a fruitful undertaking. In her astute study, Adams adopts an ethnographer's methodology and focuses on how the local people view these staged, highly spectacular performances. She finds, perhaps surprisingly, that the average person in Uzbekistan does not find these state-sponsored performances very appealing. This raises the question, if the public is indifferent to these speculator performances, then why have them? She argues that mass spectacle allow the political and, to lesser extent, the cultural elite to be a vehicle or means to communicate their cultural uniqueness and normalcy not only to the local population, but also to another, equally important imagined audience: the political and cultural elites in other nations. In this way, the "globalization of culture and the arts [has resulted in] culture producers [who] increasingly strive for international recognition of their own culture and compete for status as artists of international quality" (p. 77). In sum, this is a well-written book that is ethnographically grounded and makes several neat observations about the process of nation178 Book Reviews building and the rise of Central Asia as, once again, a major player in world affairs. William Jankowiak is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His e-mail address is jankowiak@ spamarrest.com Images of the Wildman in Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Perspective. By Gregory FORTH. London & New York: Routledge, 2008. 343 pp. Reviewed by Anthony R. WALKER Gregory Forth, an Oxford-trained social anthropologist, is well known for his extensive field research and meticulous writings on eastern Indonesia, focused especially on the Rindi of eastern Sumba and on the Nage and Keo of central Flores. His painstakingly researched 2004 book Nage Birds: Classification and Symbolism among an Eastern Indonesian People, together with numerous papers, have established Forth as a leading authority in the fields of ethnotaxonomy and ethnozoology. He unites these skills with wider interests in myth, symbolism and religion, again clearly demonstrated in his 1998 book Beneath the Volcano: Religion, Cosmology and Spirit Classification among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia. In the book under review, Forth brings to bear his various skills as ethnozoologist, mythologist, symbolist and comparative ethnologist to address the still far-from-resolved question of "what were the ebu gogo?" (the title of his concluding chapter), a category of "wildmen" remembered by Nage as hairy, cultureless, troglodytes living on the eastern slopes of Ebu Lobo Volcano, whom their ancestors exterminated by fire some two-and-a-half centuries ago. Already an expert in the exploration of sociocultural materials across a wide range of Southeast Asian societies, Forth relates (p. x) that it was in 1984 that he conceived of a comparative study of wildman images, when he first began to hear Nage stories of ebu gogo. These creatures, his informants insisted, were quite distinct from any of the spirit entities whose existence they also recognized. As Forth began his search for comparative materials, he moved far beyond his customary range of Book Reviews 179 peoples and cultures (Island Southeast Asia, Island and Mainland Southeast Asia, or the Austronesian-speaking world), delving now into records from other Asian regions: Sri Lanka, China, and Central Asia, as well as the world beyond: Europe, North America, Australia, Africa and Oceania. Forth's intention was to investigate the degree to which the widespread representations of wildmen might be explained as imaginary constructs based either on ideological values or on social institutions (the approach most favored by sociocultural anthropologists), on "pan-human mental archetypes," an approach derived from Carl Jung's analytical psychology and espoused, for a time, by Rodney Needham, Forth's teacher at Oxford, or else based on some form of zoological reality. To strip a long, very well-argued and meticulously documented, story to its barest threads, the author concludes that many of the Asian and African representations of hairy wildmen are based on empirical observations or on memories of anthropoid apes (in some parts of Southeast Asia, specifically the Orang Utang). Sometimes these representations are supplemented by exaggerated perceptions of ethnic strangers. North American and Australian representations, he suggests, are informed by common Western ideas of primitive hairy humans or subhumans carried to these continents by Western immigrants-ideas quite possibly also rooted in ancient experiences of apes. But some representations, including those of the Nage's ebu gogo, Forth believes, cannot so easily be traced to non-human primates. The only such creature known to inhabit-or ever to have inhabited-Flores is the long-tailed macaque, with whom Nage are completely familiar and in no way associate with ebu gogo. Twenty years after he had first conceived of his monograph on wildmen-in the summer of 2004-Forth was in the Netherlands researching library materials for his wildman book. It was only at this point that he learned of the amazing 2003 discovery in the Manggarai region of western Flores of skeletal remains of a hitherto unknown hominid, possibly a dwarf form of Homo erectus, named by its finders as Homo floresiensis. Dating to no more than 13,000 to 18,000 years ago, the newly-discovered hominid must have coexisted with Homo sapiens on Flores Island. Could Homo floresiensis possibly have survived longer on Flores than the dates given for the skeletal remains so recently discovered? Is it possible to conceive a connection between 180 Book Reviews the Nage's ebu gogo and the newly-discovered dwarf hominid that its discoverers also dubbed "the hobbit"? Forth is careful-indeed more cautious than some of the scientific commentators-to avoid any immediate linking of the Nage's ebu gogo stories with Homo floresiensis. He considers, dispassionately, arguments both for and against the equation, finally leaving the question open. Instead he writes, "regardless of the eventual verdict on the remains interpreted as Homo floresiensis, one of several developments of their unexpected discovery is the way it has highlighted arresting similarities between palaeanthropological reconstructions of archaic hominins and representations of hominoidal creatures maintained by non-western peoples like the Nage" (p. 285). The remarkable coincidence that links the discovery of the Homo floresiensis materials with Forth's preparation of his "wildman" monograph has undoubtedly imbued the latter with an element of sensationalism. But let the reader beware: Forth's book is not a work of popular cryptozoology. It is a difficult, though rewarding, read that adheres to the highest standards of scholarly writing and discourse. It is a pity, however, that Forth's publisher did not insist on a superior index. The five-and-a-quarter pages that are provided do no justice to the work. (There is not even an entry for hominin, hominoid or hobbit!) There is a hugely valuable bibliography of references cited, but Ames and Halpin, whose work we are invited to consult on the very first page of the Preface, is unfortunately not included. This reviewer feels compelled, once again, to express his distaste for endnotes. There are twenty-eight pages of them in this book, densely packed with a wealth of valuable additional data, which, had they only been presented as footnotes, would surely have made this book a more user-friendly research tool. And while quibbling, this reviewer finds it strange that so many vernacular words that seem to demand italicization are in Roman script. Indeed, it is difficult to follow exactly what style the publishers have chosen to adopt for this work. At a cost of £90.00 (reduced from the original £100.00 price tag) the book is more-or-less destined for libraries rather than for individual ownership. Surely one must deplore the current trend among British academic publishers of pricing their products so far beyond the reach of the majority of individuals-including, perhaps, all of those working outside of the Western world-who are likely to be most interested in their wares. Book Reviews 181 Anthony R. Walker is Professor of Anthropology, Sociology & Anthropology Programme, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. His e-mail address is anthonywalker@brunet.bn Pika-Pika: The Flashing Firefly: Essays to Honour and Celebrate the Life of Pauline Hetland Walker (1938−2005) by Her Friends in the Arts and Social Sciences. Edited by Anthony WALKER. Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation. 2009. 384 pp. Reviewed by Jennifer ALEXANDER I read this volume of diverse essays, whose only common theme is the person, Pauline Hetland Walker, with whom each individual author had a friendship or professional attachment, with a great deal of interest. Lovingly crafted and edited by the husband of the late Pauline Walker, the individual essays document the high regard in which Pauline was held and the wide range of her intellectual and artistic interests. Anthony Walker, an anthropologist renowned for his seminal works on the Toda of South India and the Lahu of highland mainland Southeast Asia and southern China, has solicited contributions from scholars whose diversity of subjects reflect the intellectual passions, artistic interests, and experiences of Pauline. In his own words, "Pika-Pika is an eclectic multidisciplinary book" (p. 14), so-called because in the poetic words of Richard Moore, one of the contributors to the volume, the pulsating light of fireflies mediates between the mountains and plains as Pauline did between nature and culture (p. 278). Given the diversity of these chapters and the journal for which this book review is prepared, in this review I focus mainly on those which reflect an ethnographic encounter with Asia. Each chapter starts and ends with a reference to Pauline, initially the circumstances of the author's and Pauline's acquaintance or meeting and subsequently a comment on their shared intellectual or artistic interests, with the substantive part of the chapter focusing on a particular aspect of their mutual passion. "Sacred Music of the Karen Hills," by Elizabeth Hinton, is an example. Hinton, herself the accompanying spouse of a prominent anthropologist who worked in northern Thailand, expresses Pauline's profound love of the fine arts. Utilizing the fieldnotes and tapes of her late husband, Peter, she documents the close association of music with 182 Book Reviews seasonal and life cycle ceremonies of the Pwo Karen. She investigates the role of music and song in both New Year and Mid-Year ceremonies as well as weddings and funerals. In contrast, the substantive part of the other three papers in Part One focus on the Modern Jazz Quartet (Bill Egan), dance and trance in Haiti and beyond (Erica Bourguignon), and Pauline's role in promoting the fine arts in Singapore through reviews she wrote for the Straits Times (Vineeta Sinha). Part Two further explores Pauline's interest in the arts: literature, poetry and the stage. Peter Hyland examines early modern performance at the London's Rose Theatre, James A. Matisoff considers Lahu religious poetry, and Roger Long analyzes Javanese wayang kulit (shadow puppetry). This last essay illustrates the adaptability of the shadow puppetry to technological innovations as well as to sociological, religious and political change. In Part Three, John and Jean McKinnon discuss women potters in Vanuatu and the legacy of Lapita while Paul Geraghty documents the life of Taraivini Wati, a prominent female potter on Nasilai, Fiji. He notes Pauline's own first-hand experience of a very different tradition of pottery as well as her close friendship with Wati. Part Four deals with various crafts: Tarun Chhabra gives a detailed account of Toda dress and embroidery patterns, and Shuichi Nagata discusses the commercialization of Hopi Native American crafts. The third chapter, by Tan Cheebeng, documents the gradual decline of traditional crafts among the Kenyah Badeng of Sarawak in East Malaysia. Under the impact of modernization and development, initially the introduction of logging and consequently the resettlement from Long Geng to Sungei Koyan to make way for the construction of the Bakun Dam, the lives of the Kenyah Badeng have been transformed. Traditional crafts such as bush knives made by men and finely woven rattan mats and bags made by women are among the numerous features of daily life that have disappeared in the course of less than two decades. Part Five illustrates Pauline's concern for women's issues. The three chapters encompass body modification in Africa and America (Mary T. Howard), the mountain goddess fertility association in northeast Japan (Richard Moore) and sex slaves under Japanese Occupation (Kim Myung-hye). Kim's paper, based on interviews with Korean "comfort women," reveals the appalling abuses suffered by them at the hands of the Japanese during the Second World War. This scholarly contribution is a welcome addition to a subject which has only in recent years Book Reviews 183 received the media attention it deserves. Traditional healing practices, the subject of Part Six, encompasses the faith healers of the Himalayas (Deborah S. Akers) and an analysis of sickness and healing in traditional Brunei Dusun society by Pudarno Binchin, an indigenous ethnographer. The three chapters in Part Seven are concerned with myth and ritual. Paul Cohen, provides a fascinating historical account of the religious, political and economic background of the present day revival of Buddhism among the Tai-speaking people of the Upper Mekong region which borders on China, Thailand, Laos and Burma. Gregory Forth adds to his extensive repertoire on ethno-ornithological research among the Nage of Flores with a comparative account of some Indonesian bird myths. Donald Tayler, the third contributor to this stimulating trio, traces the origins of the famous myth of El Dorado, the gilded man, to the sacred mountain of the Ika of Northeastern Columbia. The volume is nicely rounded off with a comprehensive account of Pauline's principal writings and editorial work between 1957 and 2005 and a scholarly index and glossary. And last, but certainly not least, the cover produced by Michael Arun, Anthony and Pauline's son, wraps up a work of art lovingly crafted. Anthony Walker has here organized an admirable collection which not only documents the high esteem in which his late wife was held, but also incorporates a significant body of research and scholarship on diverse topics. Although predominantly an Asian collection (twelve chapters), the other eight chapters ensure an eclectic mix incorporating Oceania, North and South America, the Caribbean, Great Britain and East Africa. The authors are similarly diverse in disciplinary orientation, ranging from anthropologists through linguists to theater and literary specialists. Pauline Hetland Walker has indeed been lovingly honored by each and every one of the authors. All essays are well worth reading and accessible to both general and specialist audiences. Jennifer Alexander is a Visiting Fellow in Anthropology at the School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University. Her e-mail address is jennifer.alexander@anu.edu.au