A Journal of Reviews

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F REVIEW

arch 2009, V olume 38, N

umber 2 March 2009 • Volume 38 • Number 2

American Sociological Association

A JOURNAL OF REVIEWS

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In this issue . . .

Eric Hanley Two Steps Forward or Two Steps Back? InstitutionalChange in Post-Soviet RussiaOwning Russia: The Struggle over Factories, Farms, andPower, by Andrew BarnesHow Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices thatShaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business, by Alena V.LedenevaMeasuring Social and Economic Change in Rural Russia:Surveys from 1991 to 2003, by David J. O’Brien andValery V. Patsiorkovsky

Jason Kaufman The Hidden Injuries of WorkThe Craftsman, by Richard SennettThe Culture of the New Capitalism, by Richard Sennett

John D. McCarthy From Race Riot to Collective ViolenceRace, Space and Riots in Chicago, New York and LosAngeles, by Janet L. Abu-LughodFighting in the Streets: Ethnic Succession and UrbanUnrest in Twentieth-Century America, by Max ArthurHerman

Michael Omi and Thinking Through Race and RacismHoward Winant Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression, by

Joe R. FeaginRacism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and thePersistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, 2nded, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Elfriede Wedam Authority versus Liberalism: Is There a Third Way?Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Change,by Melissa J. WildeAfter the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings are Shaping the Future of American Religion,by Robert Wuthnow

Rhys H. Williams Transnational Religion and the Shaping of Politics,Ethnicity, and CultureNew Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race,and Ethnicity in Indian America, by Khyati Y. JoshiA Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of anAmerican Hinduism, by Prema A. KurienGod Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the ChangingAmerican Religious Landscape, by Peggy Levitt

March 2009–Volume 38–Number 2

EDITORAlan Sica

MANAGING EDITORAnne Sica

ASSISTANT EDITORSKathryn Densberger

Richard M. Simon

Paul AmatoPennsylvania State University

Robert AntonioUniversity of Kansas

Karen BarkeyColumbia University

Victoria BonnellUniversity of California, Berkeley

Alan BoothPennsylvania State University

Rose BrewerUniversity of Minnesota

Dana BrittonKansas State University

Craig CalhounNew York University

Bruce CarruthersNorthwestern University

Georgi DerluguianNorthwestern University

Paul DiMaggioPrinceton University

Francis DodooPennsylvania State University

Elaine DraperCalifornia State University, Los Angeles

Yen Le EspirituUniversity of California, San Diego

Joan H. FujimuraUniversity of Wisconsin

Joe GerteisUniversity of Minnesota

Janice IrvineUniversity of Massachusetts,Amherst

Nazli KibriaBoston University

Douglas KlaymanSocial Dynamics, LLC

Charles LemertWesleyan University

Nicole MarwellColumbia University

John McCarthyPennsylvania State University

Ruth MilkmanUniversity of California, Los Angeles

Valentine MoghadamPurdue University

Mignon MooreUniversity of California, Los Angeles

Ann MorningNew York University

Andrew NoymerUniversity of California, Irvine

Jennifer PierceUniversity of Minnesota

Harland PrechelTexas A&M University

Robert SampsonHarvard University

Michael SchudsonUniversity of California, San Diego

Wendy SimondsGeorgia State University

Neil SmelserUniversity of California,Berkeley

Christian SmithNotre Dame University

Judith TreasUniversity of California, Irvine

Stephen TurnerUniversity of South Florida

Jeff UlmerPennsylvania State University

EDITORIAL BOARD

Pennsylvania State University

A JOURNAL OF REVIEWS

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CONTENTS

vii Editor’s Note

Author Title Reviewer

111 Andrew Barnes

Alena V.Ledeneva

David J. O’Brienand Valery V.Patsiorkovsky

Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories,Farms, and PowerHow Russia Really Works: The InformalPractices that Shaped Post-Soviet Politics andBusinessMeasuring Social and Economic Change inRural Russia: Surveys from 1991 to 2003

Eric Hanley

Two Steps Forward or Two Steps Back? Institutional Change in Post-Soviet Russia

REVIEW ESSAYS

115 Richard Sennett The CraftsmanThe Culture of the New Capitalism

Jason Kaufman

118 Janet L. Abu-LughodMax ArthurHerman

Race, Space and Riots in Chicago, New Yorkand Los AngelesFighting in the Streets: Ethnic Succession andUrban Unrest in Twentieth-Century America

John D. McCarthyFrom Race Riot to Collective Violence

121 Joe R. FeaginEduardoBonilla-Silva

Systemic Racism: A Theory of OppressionRacism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racismand the Persistence of Racial Inequality in theUnited States, 2nd ed

Michael Omi andHoward Winant

Thinking Through Race and Racism

125 Melissa J. Wilde

RobertWuthnow

Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of ReligiousChangeAfter the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- andThirty-Somethings are Shaping the Future ofAmerican Religion

Elfriede WedamAuthority versus Liberalism: Is There a Third Way?

129 Khyati Y. Joshi

Prema A. Kurien

Peggy Levitt

New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground:Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in IndianAmericaA Place at the Multicultural Table: TheDevelopment of an American HinduismGod Needs No Passport: Immigrants and theChanging American Religious Landscape

Rhys H. Williams

Transnational Religion and the Shaping of Politics, Ethnicity, and Culture

The Hidden Injuries of Work

139140

Michael IanBorerTim Delaney

Gary Alan Fine

Akira Furukawa

Jane O’ConnorSarah E.H.MooreElizabeth Shove,MatthewWatson, MartinHand, and JackIngram

Faithful to Fenway: Believing in Boston,Baseball, and America’s Most Beloved BallparkSimpsonology: There’s a Little Bit ofSpringfield in All of UsAuthors of the Storm: Meteorologists and theCulture of PredictionVillage Life in Modern Japan: AnEnvironmental PerspectiveThe Cultural Significance of the Child StarRibbon Culture: Charity, Compassion andPublic AwarenessThe Design of Everyday Life

Andrew Deener

Seth L. Feinberg

Charles Thorpe

Scott Schnell

Steve Carlton-FordTodd M. Callais

James WilliamGibson

Culture

REVIEWS

148150

Elliott R.Barkan, HasiaDiner, and AlanM. Kraut, eds.Wayne A.Cornelius,David S.Fitzgerald, andPedro LewinFisher, eds.Frank F.FurstenbergTerry-Ann Jones

Tiziana NazioCharles Watters

From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to theU.S. in a Global Era

Mayan Journeys: The New Migration fromYucatán to the United States

Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics ofTeen ChildbearingJamaican Immigrants in the United States andCanada: Race, Transnationalism, and SocialCapitalCohabitation, Family and SocietyRefugee Children: Towards the Next Horizon

Ewa Morawska

James Loucky

Frank Munger

Ann H. Kim

Susan L. BrownSteven J. Gold

Demography

Todd R. Clear

Mark Findlay

Melvin Juetteand Ronald J.BergerPeter K.Manning

Phil Scraton

Imprisoning Communities: How MassIncarceration Makes DisadvantagedNeighborhoods WorseGoverning Through Globalised Crime: Futuresfor International Criminal JusticeWheelchair Warrior: Gangs, Disability, andBasketball

The Technology of Policing: Crime Mapping,Information Technology, and the Rationality ofCrime ControlPower, Conflict and Criminalisation

George E. Tita

Mathieu Deflem

Robert V.Grantham

Otwin Marenin

Ursula Castellano

Deviance and Control

Dennis Sullivanand Larry Tifft,eds.Alex S. Vitale

Handbook of Restorative Justice: A GlobalPerspective

City of Disorder: How the Quality of LifeCampaign Changed New York Politics

Gregg Barak

John Krinsky

Barbara J. Bank,ed.MaureenHallinan, ed.

Gender and Education, An Encyclopedia(Volumes 1 and 2)School Sector and Student Outcomes

Alison J. Bianchi

Jamie Lynch

Education

Donald A. Barr

Gerald E.Markle andFrances B.McCrea

Health Disparities in the United States: SocialClass, Race, Ethnicity, and HealthWhat If Medicine Disappeared?

Susan Sered

Marcello A.Maviglia and TassyParker

Health

Aziza Khazzoom

Aida HarveyWingfield

Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality inIsrael: Or, How the Polish Peddler Became aGerman IntellectualDoing Business with Beauty: Black Women,Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy

Jeremy Hein

Elaine Bell Kaplan

Ethnicity

Paul D. Almeida

Nina Bandelj

Angie Y. Chung

Robert L. Hicks,Bradley C. Parks,J. TimmonsRoberts, andMichael J.TierneyIsaac WilliamMartinEric H. Mielants

Damien Short

MilanZafirovski

Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in ElSalvador, 1925–2005From Communists to Foreign Capitalists: TheSocial Foundations of Foreign DirectInvestment in Postsocialist EuropeLegacies of Struggle: Conflict and Cooperationin Korean American PoliticsGreening Aid? Understanding theEnvironmental Impact of DevelopmentAssistance

The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the PropertyTax Transformed American PoliticsThe Origins of Capitalism and the “Rise of theWest”Reconciliation and Colonial Power: IndigenousRights in AustraliaModern Free Society and its Nemesis: Libertyversus Conservatism in the New Millennium,Volume 1

Charles D. Brockett

Mark A. Cichock

Nancy Abelmann

Sing C. Chew

Mildred A.SchwartzWilliam I. Robinson

Robert van Krieken

Darcy K. Leach

Politics

185186

Jens BeckertWendy LeoMooreFeng Wang

Inherited WealthReproducing Racism: White Space, Elite LawSchools, and Racial InequalityBoundaries and Categories: Rising Inequalityin Post-Socialist Urban China

Catherine SiebelAngela P. Harris

Alvin Y. So

Stratification

Hugh Campbell,MichaelMayerfeld Bell,and MargaretFinney, eds.Megan Comfort

Eva Illouz

Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life

Doing Time Togther: Love and Family in theShadow of the PrisonCold Intimacies: The Making of EmotionalCapitalism

Marybeth C. Stalp

Sara Wakefield

Rene Almeling

Social Psychology

190192

ZygmuntBaumanRandall CollinsBülent Dikenand CarstenBagge LaustsenGlennFirebaughJon Frauley andFrank Pearce,eds.Jack NusanPorterJonathan H.Turner

Liquid Fear Liquid Times: Living in an Age of UncertaintyViolence: A Micro-Sociological TheorySociology through the Projector

Seven Rules for Social Research

Critical Realism and the Social Sciences:Heterodox Elaborations

Is Sociology Dead? Social Theory and SocialPraxis in a Post-Modern AgeHuman Emotions: A Sociological Theory

Barry Glassner

Alice GoffmanJacqueline Clark

Theodore C.WagenaarIsaac Reed

Aditya K. Mishra

Emily Meanwell

Theory and Methods

198 Terry McGee,George C. S. Lin,Andrew Marton,Mark Wang, andJiaping Wu

China’s Urban Space: Development underMarket Socialism

Valerie A. LewisUrban and Communities

Marjorie L.DeVault, ed.BrookeHarrington

People at Work: Life, Power, and SocialInclusion in the New EconomyPop Finance: Investment Clubs and the NewInvestor Populism

Mary Blair-Loy

Jeffrey J. Sallaz

Work and Organizations

208208

David Bacon

Ana AlejandraGermaniJane A. Grant

Gert J.F. Leeneand Theo N.M.SchuytMartin J. Murray

Kimberly D.NettlesMarc Pilisuk;with JenniferAchordRountreeJanine Schipper

Selcuk R. Sirinand MichelleFineRichard StiversSuzanneVromen

Ian Whitmarsh

Illegal People: How Globalization CreatesMigration and Criminalizes ImmigrantsAntifascism and Sociology: Gino Germani:1911–1979The New American Social Compact: Rights andResponsibilities in the Twenty-First CenturyThe Power of the Stranger: Structures andDynamics in Social Intervention: A TheoreticalFrameworkTaming the Disorderly City: The SpatialLandscape of Johannesburg after ApartheidGuyana Diaries: Women’s Lives AcrossDifferenceWho Benefits from Global Violence and War:Uncovering a Destructive System

Disappearing Desert: The Growth of Phoenixand the Culture of SprawlMuslim American Youth: UnderstandingHyphenated Identities through MultipleMethodsThe Illusion of Freedom and EqualityHidden Children of the Holocaust: BelgianNuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jewsfrom the NazisBiomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and theContested Meaning of Genetic Research in theCaribbean

Briefly Noted

COMMENT AND REPLY 210

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED 211

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews (ISSN 0094-3061) is published bimonthlyin January, March, May, July, September, and November by the American SociologicalAssociation, 1430 K Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005, is typeset by MarczakBusiness Services, Inc., Albany, New York and is printed by Boyd Printing Company, Albany,New York. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices.POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Contemporary Sociology, 1430 K Street NW, Suite600, Washington, DC 20005.

Concerning book reviews and comments, write the Editor, Contemporary Sociology, Depart-ment of Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, 211 Oswald Tower, University Park,PA 16802, Email: cs@la.psu.edu. CS does not accept unsolicited reviews, nor self-nominations for reviewing a specific book. We do, however, welcome vitae of prospec-tive reviewers. Also, CS will not process review-copies of books sent by any person ororganization other than the original publisher. Authors wanting to assure considerationof their book by CS should advise their publisher to send a review copy directly to thejournal's editorial office. The invitation to review a book assumes that the prospectivereviewer has not reviewed that book for another scholarly journal. Comments on reviewsmust be fewer than 300 words and typed double-spaced. Submission of a comment doesnot guarantee publication. CS reserves the right to reject any comment that does not engagea substantive issue in a review or is otherwise unsuitable. Authors of reviews are invited toreply. Book reviews in CS are indexed in Book Review Index, published by Gale ResearchCompany.

Concerning advertising, changes of address, and subscriptions, write the Executive Office,American Sociological Association, 1430 K Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005.Subscription rates for members, $40 ($25 student members); institutions, $185. Ratesinclude postage in the U.S. and Canada; elsewhere, add $20 per journal subscription forinternational postage. Single issues available: $7 to members, $15 to nonmembers, $20 toinstitutions. New subscriptions and renewals will be entered on a calendar-year basis only.Changes to address: Six weeks advance notice to the Executive Office and old address aswell as new are necessary for change of subscriber’s address. Claims for undelivered copiesmust be made within the month following the regular month of publication. The publisherwill supply missing copies when losses have been sustained in transit and when the reservestock will permit.

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The American Sociological Association acknowledges with appreciation the facilities andassistance provided by Pennsylvania State University. Cover art by Tina Burke; design byRobert Marczak.

In 1987 a group of psychologists publishedThe Compleat Academic: A Practical Guide forthe Beginning Social Scientist (McGraw-Hill),which has apparently become a standard ref-erence for young professors, and not onlypsychologists. Shelley E. Taylor and JoanneMartin wrote Chapter Two, “The Present-Minded Professor: Controlling One’sCareer,” and on p. 41, novices were advisedas follows:

“There are some other things you shouldnot publish early in your career. .|.|.Book reviews can also be an unreward-ing business. Few people read bookreviews. Positive reviews tend to bebland, while negative reviews make youenemies. Of course, if you are going toread the book anyway and really want towrite a review, go ahead, but bewarned.”

A second edition of The Compleat Academicappeared in 2004 and was published by theAmerican Psychological Association, aweighty imprimatur. The Taylor/Martinchapter was moved from second place tonineteenth, was retitled “The AcademicMarathon: Controlling One’s Career,” andthe passage quoted above was deleted. Per-haps during the intervening 17 years it hadbecome so obvious to “everyone,” in psy-chology at any rate, that reviewing bookswas a waste of their time that such admoni-tions were no longer necessary.

In response I could note the vacuousnature of much psychological research, andmight suggest that this is due in part to a cal-culated refusal to read books. But producingvapid writings is hardly an achievementunique to the 150,000 members of the Amer-ican Psychological Association. I could alsopoint out the claim “few people read bookreviews” is untrue for sociologists, who paymore general attention to reviews in the topjournals than to articles, partly because theyare more fun to read, and also more effi-ciently provide useful information.

We come to the Categorical Imperative ofBook Reviewing. Kant’s version of sameheld that “I ought never to act except in sucha way that I can also will that my maxim shouldbecome a universal law” (H.J. Paton transla-tion). According to Taylor and Martin, oneshould not review books because it is pro-fessionally inconvenient. This leaves us withan anti-Kantian conundrum: everyone wantstheir articles and books to be read and (posi-tively) evaluated by peers, yet nobodywishes to reciprocate by committing time toreading a book and then writing a responseto it, even a short one of 800 words. Thissorry state of affairs has in fact begun to be“normative,” based on the data of the firstfew months of my editorship. Senior facultyare too busy writing their own works orpreparing for retirement; mid-careerists aretoo busy preparing for their promotions; andjunior faculty have been warned off review-ing as a drag on their frightening tenure-clock.

It occurs to me, of course, that graduatestudents might be the best source ofreviews—law school journals are run by stu-dents, after all, with good results. Yet whena scholar commits years of work to a mono-graph, he or she rightly expects that a gen-uine peer will evaluate the work, and not anovice, full of enthusiasm but lacking wis-dom and knowledge. Or alternatively, theASA could adopt an off-shoring, out-sourc-ing policy. I would thereby be empowered toapproach our colleagues in India, China,Vietnam, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, orChile to write all the reviews of books writ-ten by U.S., Canadian, and British sociolo-gists. They have done extremely well makingour consumer goods, and there’s no reasonto suppose they could not as handily writeour reviews as well.

The next time you are invited to review abook in your area of expertise by CS or one ofthe other major journals, instead of instantlyclaiming to be too busy with more “impor-tant” duties, recall the noble Kantian dictum,

EDITOR’S REMARKS:THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE

TO WRITE REVIEWS

vii Contemporary Sociology 38, 2

viii–Editors’ Note

and then consider if you would prefer tohave your next book sent abroad for evalua-tion. I am charged with selecting 350 booksfor review each year out of about 1000 the CSoffice receives, and if my colleagues in theanglophone sphere are too busy or otherwise

preoccupied to write reviews, it becomes myduty to search for alternative pools ofreviewing talent.

Alan Sicacs@la.psu.edu

Contemporary Sociology 38, 2

Much of the research on the socioeconomictransformations that shook Russia in the1990s has focused on two interrelatedthemes: the path-dependent nature of insti-tutional change and the nature of the post-socialist stratification order. Each of thebooks reviewed here advances the discussionof these two topics, albeit from differentangles. In my comments I suggest severalways to improve the level of debate aboutinstitutional change and distributional out-comes in contemporary Russia, including theneed for more detailed attention to eco-nomic transactions among firms and house-holds in order to balance path-dependencieswith an appreciation for the manner in whichmarkets are shaping incentives and therebygenerating social change.

How Russia Really Works is based on inter-views the author conducted between 1997and 2003 with 50 informants, including busi-nesspeople, journalists, law enforcement offi-cials, accountants, and legal experts. In thebook, Ledeneva shows how defects in theformal structure of Russian society haveforced individuals and organizations to relyon informal practices, many of which dateback to the Soviet period, to achieve theirgoals. The author devotes separate chaptersto six informal practices in particular: chernyipiar (the release of negative informationabout candidates for political office), kompro-mat (the gathering of compromising infor-mation on politicians and businessmen forpurposes of blackmail), krugovaia poruka (themutual cover-up of illicit activities withinelite circles), tenevoi barter (reliance barterchains, surrogate financial instruments, andother non-market mechanisms of exchange),dvoinaia bukhgalteriia (double accounting andother financial schemes which allow entre-preneurs to avoid taxes and export capitalabroad), and, last but not least, tolkachi (the

emergence of alternative forms of lawenforcement such as private security ser-vices).

Since there already exists a rather large lit-erature on informal practices in Russia, thequestion any reviewer must ask is, in whatways does How Russia Really Works add toour understanding of this subject? Thebook’s main contribution lies in its emphasison the manner in which informal practicespromote as opposed to subvert institutionalchange. Most accounts of such practices asbarter, double accounting, and private lawenforcement in contemporary Russia empha-size their corrosive character (see for exampleVolkov, 1999; Gel’man, 2004). While Lede-neva admits that informal practices fre-quently undermine formal institutions, shenevertheless goes against the grain of muchof the existing literature by insisting thatthese practices often alter formal institutionsin a positive manner. Reliance on barter, forexample, facilitated exchange in a highlyuncertain environment even as it under-

REVIEW ESSAYS

111 Contemporary Sociology 38, 2

Two Steps Forward or Two Steps Back? Institutional Change in Post-Soviet Russia

ERIC HANLEYUniversity of Kansas

hanley@ku.edu

Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories,Farms, and Power, by Andrew Barnes.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.273pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780801444340.

How Russia Really Works: The InformalPractices that Shaped Post-Soviet Politics andBusiness, by Alena V. Ledeneva. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 270pp.$22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780801443466.

Measuring Social and Economic Change inRural Russia: Surveys from 1991 to 2003, byDavid J. O’Brien and Valery V.Patsiorkovsky. Lanham, MD: LexingtonBooks. 240pp. $99.00 cloth. ISBN:9780739114209.

112–Review Essays

mined economic development by promotinga range of shadow practices. In a similar fash-ion, tax evasion allowed firms to pay wages,finance operations and reinvest a portion oftheir capital in an environment characterizedby high tax rates, corrupt government, andarbitrary judgments on the part of tax inspec-tors. According to Ledeneva, scholars gener-ally ignore the progressive aspect of informalpractices in Russia, and one of the strengthsof her new book is that it presents a balancedaccount of the manner in which informalpractices both promote and impede institu-tional change.

While I am sympathetic to the claim thatinformal practices have contributed to thedevelopment of markets in Russia, I am lessconvinced that they effected positive changein the political arena. In the concludingchapter, Ledeneva concedes as much whenshe acknowledges that cover-ups, black PR,the collection of compromising information,and the activities of private security forces“serve the needs of the current regime byundermining the principles of free and fairelections, independent media, and the rule oflaw and by exerting symbolic violence ormanipulation of public opinion” (p. 193). Onthe basis of the evidence the author herselfputs forward, it is difficult to agree with herconclusion that “the changes that informalpractices have introduced into the post-Soviet system are associated with economicrationality, political competition, and therule of law” (p. 195). Having argued persua-sively that state actors have relied on infor-mal practices to derail democracy and under-mine the rule of law, Ledeneva’s assertionthat these practices have somehow promotedthe reform of political and legal institutionsfails to carry much weight.

Unlike How Russia Really Works, OwningRussia by Andrew Barnes is based largely onsecondary research. The book neverthelessprovides valuable insights into the pro-longed struggle for ownership rights in post-socialist Russia. In regard to the transforma-tion of industrial enterprises, three points inparticular deserve mention. First, and per-haps not surprisingly, the author shows thatenterprise directors have been the main ben-eficiaries of privatization. Although the massprivatization program of 1992 distributedownership shares in thousands of state enter-

prises to workers and citizens, it left de factocontrol over industrial firms in the hands ofmanagers, and Barnes spends much of thebook documenting the strategies managersadopted to convert their de facto control intode jure ownership rights. Second, Barnes per-forms a valuable service by highlighting theemergence of regional economic elites. Muchhas been written about the rise of the oli-garchs during Yeltsin’s presidency; less isknown, however, about “second-tier groups”at the regional level which have establishedownership rights over key assets in large partas a result of their strong ties to local admin-istrators. With the weakening of the oligarchsat the federal level, Barnes predicts that thenext round in the struggle for property inRussia will pit state actors against theseregionally based economic elites. Third,Barnes shows that the central state hasreestablished itself as the most importantplayer in the ongoing competition for prop-erty rights. Although Barnes emphasizesthat government officials will face stiff com-petition from enterprise directors, second-tier groups and oligarchs in the continuingstruggle for property, the fact that Putin andhis entourage are committed to reassertingstate ownership rights in key sectors of theeconomy indicates that the property rightsstructure which eventually emerges willmost certainly possess a distinctive statistquality.

In addition to providing a comprehensiveanalysis of property transformations in theindustrial sector, Owning Russia also focusesattention on a much neglected part of thetransition from state socialism: ownershipstruggles in the agricultural sector. In theimmediate aftermath of the collapse of com-munism, the goal of reformers within thegovernment was to dissolve collective farms,distribute the land, and in the process createa class of private farmers. According toBarnes, these efforts failed. The number ofprivate farmers in Russia amounted to only264,000 as of 2003, falling far short of thereformers’ original goal of one million. Col-lective farms reemerged in the post-socialistperiod in the form of joint-stock companiesunder the management of former directors.Most importantly, rural residents for themost part chose to keep their land withinthese transformed enterprises as opposed to

Review Essays–113

withdrawing it, as they were legally empow-ered to do. In addition, Barnes argues that apeculiar symbiosis has emerged betweenlarge agricultural enterprises on the onehand and small-plot producers on the other,with relatively high levels of productivity onsmall plots sustained by means of inputsfrom the former collective farms in exchangefor the labor services and land shares of ruralresidents. In the end, the two institutionswhich organized agricultural productionduring the Soviet period, collective farmsand household plots, persist to this day in analtered form. The result, according to Barnes,has been a “low-level economic equilibrium”(p. 150) which has provided just enough inthe way of agricultural output to keep bothenterprises and households afloat.

Barnes’ account of ownership struggles incontemporary Russia challenges the “unidi-mensional” view that property transforma-tion in Russia would take the form of a com-plete and orderly transfer of state propertyinto private hands, and for this the bookdeserves high praise. My main criticism ofOwning Russia has to do with a failure on theauthor’s part to situate his analysis withincurrent theoretical debates, which revolvelargely around the impact of ownershiprights on the performance of firms. In oneway or another, most of the scholars whohave examined property transformations inRussia have concluded that emergent own-ership rights in Russia have failed to provideowners with an incentive to reorient produc-tion in an economically rational manner (seeBurawoy and Krotov 1992; Gaddy and Ickes2002; King 2003). According to manyobservers, what has emerged on the basis ofthe property rights structure in Russia is nota modern, capitalist economy but rather a“virtual” or “demodernized” economy char-acterized by the contraction of production,asset stripping, and a retreat to non-marketactivities. Barnes’ empirical description ofproperty transformation in Russia appears tobe in line with these more theoreticallyinformed accounts, and it is a shame that hedoes not draw out the implications of hisresearch and engage directly in ongoingdebates regarding the effects of ownershipchanges on firm performance.

The discussion of institutional change inrural Russia put forward by O’Brien and Pat-

siorkovsky in Measuring Social and EconomicChange in Rural Russia largely mirrors that ofBarnes. It differs, however, in one importantway. O’Brien and Patsiorkovsky find ruralRussia to be much more economicallydynamic than does Barnes, and they locatethe sources of this dynamism within twoabove-mentioned groups: private farmersand small-plot producers. Although privatefarmers represent a relatively small class, theauthors point out that they have accountedfor an increasing percentage of agriculturaloutput since the collapse of communism (upfrom 1.9 percent in 1995 to 5.9 percent as of2004) and have thus emerged within as aviable institutional alternative to large enter-prises. In addition, O’Brien and Pat-siorkovsky cite official statistics which showthat households working small plotsaccounted for 56 percent of agricultural out-put in 2003 despite cultivating only 14 per-cent of the land. It is facts such as these thatlead O’Brien and Patsiorkovsky to concludethat the market activities of private farmersand rural households have brought aboutsubstantial change in the Russian country-side, a view which distinguishes theirapproach considerably from that of Barnes.

Much of Measuring Social and EconomicChange in Rural Russia is devoted to an exam-ination of the new forms of inequality in thecountryside which have emerged as a resultof the market activities of individuals andhouseholds. According to O’Brien and Pat-siorkovsky, the breakdown of collectivefarms and the collapse of social safety netsnot only caused great hardship in rural Rus-sia; they also created entrepreneurial oppor-tunities of which many households havetaken advantage. The third part of theirbook uncovers a strong association betweenincome inequality in the countryside and themarket activities of households. Not surpris-ingly, households which produce for mar-kets bring in far more income on averagethan their non-market-oriented counterparts.Based on analysis of survey data which theycollected, the authors show that market activ-ity in turn is based largely on the human andsocial resources of households. Here theauthors put forward some counterintuitivefindings. The educational level of householdmembers, for example, is unrelated to pro-duction for markets, while presence of adults

114–Review Essays

receiving a pension significantly increasesthe odds of market participation. A consid-erable portion of rural poverty in Russia is tobe found among intact husband-wife fami-lies with dependent children. In regard tosocial capital, results from a multivariateanalysis indicate that the ability to obtainassistance from other rural residents is cru-cial to the success of household agriculturalenterprises; both of the variables the authorsuse to measure rural social networks (thenumber of persons known by householdmembers and an index of household involve-ment in community activities) are positivelyassociated with the production and sale ofagricultural goods.

My main criticism of the O’Brien and Pat-siorkiovsky book has to do with the mannerin which they assess the role of social net-works in facilitating the production of agri-cultural goods on household plots. Morespecifically, I believe that the authors havefailed to incorporate into their analysis apotentially important set of social ties, thosebased in the workplace. Pahl’s (1984)research on household production in con-temporary Europe shows that employment-related ties are significant not only becausework is one of the main milieus in whichsocial ties are established in the first place butalso because networks based in the work-place often provide access (surreptitious ornot) to crucial inputs. Given the symbioticrelationship that has developed betweenlarge agricultural enterprises and small-plotproducers in rural Russia, I would expectwork-related networks to be of particularimportance in that context. Researchersmight therefore want to consider includingdirect measures of employment-relatedsocial networks in future analyses of house-hold agricultural production in contempo-rary Russia.

The danger of path-dependent approachesto institutional change in post-socialist soci-eties is that they often fail to capture theextent to which economic and politicalreforms place the societies in question onnew developmental trajectories. MeasuringSocial and Economic Change in Rural Russiadeserves praise for avoiding this trap.Although O’Brien and Patsiorkiovsky realizethat communist-era institutions have left astrong imprint upon the property relations in

rural Russia, their book nevertheless bal-ances an appreciation for both path depen-dencies and market dynamisms. The argu-ments presented in the other two booksreviewed here fail to achieve such a balance.In Owning Russia, for example, Barnes insiststhat owners of industrial enterprises aremore interested in stripping assets, hidingincome, and acquiring additional holdingsthan they are in restructuring their firms inan economically rational manner (pp. 12–13).This assertion is unsupported and appearsoutdated; at least since the ruble collapse of1998, there is evidence to suggest that theowners of large industrial enterprises inRussia have increasingly been pursuing prof-its according to capitalist principles, such asreducing production costs, increasing marketshare, and investing in new plants andequipment (Hanson 2003; Frye 2006). Bar-nes’s reluctance to consider the possibilitythat privatization has provides incentives torestructure enterprises not only preventshim from addressing important theoreticaldebates, as noted above, it also leads him toput forward an account of property transfor-mation in Russia which rests excessively onthe manner in which preexisting institu-tional arrangements privilege certain socialactors.

In a similar fashion, Ledeneva’s insistencethat informal practices such as barter anddouble accounting continue to operate fullyin the post-1998 period (pp. 140, 162) under-states the significance of market-drivenchanges over the last decade in Russia.According to many observers, high rates ofeconomic growth since 1998 resulted in themonetization of the economy and the regularpayment of wages and pensions, which inturn reduced the scope and scale of transac-tions based on the bartering of goods. Byboosting revenues, the growth of the econ-omy also allowed the government to cuttaxes dramatically, which enhanced thetransparency of business activities andreduced the incidence of tax evasion (Hanson2003). In the economic realm at least, there isevery indication that the informal practiceson which Ledeneva focuses have become lesssalient. As was the case with Barnes,Ledeneva’s failure to acknowledge evidenceof market-driven change in Russia allows herto place undue emphasis on institutions

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It is always a bit disconcerting when twobooks by the same author appear to bear con-tradictory arguments; more so when thatauthor writes as elegantly, thinks as deeply,and expounds information as prodigiouslyas Richard Sennett. The fault may be myown; I may simply misunderstand thesebooks. Nonetheless, I suspect that manysociologists will find them equally roughgoing, particularly when it comes to synthe-sizing and confirming their central tenets.

First, the consistency question: In The Cul-ture of the New Capitalism, Sennett seems toargue that the wage labor jobs of the “old”industrial economy were much preferable tothose in the post-capitalist economy. In TheCraftsman, however, he seems to dismissboth as unedifying, unfulfilling kinds ofwork, advocating instead for work that repli-cates the pre-modern experience of makinghand-crafted, artisanal goods one piece at atime. It may be that Sennett is actually advo-cating for a middle way—secure, life-timeemployment for companies that make cus-tom goods by time-tested methods—but thisdoes not get mentioned in either work, nordoes self-employment as an alternative.

The Craftsman is not a particularly socio-logical book, but it is interesting all the

same. In it, Sennett describes in loving detailvarious pathways to the mastery of craft pur-suits like musicianship, gold-smithing, andbrick-making. The book is filled with colorfulhistorical detail, much of it highly original.Sennett breaks craftsmanship down into sev-eral components, from learning the tools ofthe trade to embracing challenges and obsta-cles. He distinguishes between art and craft:“Art seems to draw attention to work that isunique or at least distinctive, whereas craftnames a more anonymous, collective, andcontinued practice” (p. 66). Though Sennettsees parallels between traditional craftworkand contemporary practices such as com-puter programming, doctoring, and parent-ing, this is where The Craftsman lands onshaky ground. While attempting to sell read-

The Hidden Injuries of WorkJASON KAUFMAN

Harvard Universityjkaufman@wjh.harvard.edu

which date back to the Soviet and pre-Sovietperiods without examining the extent towhich these practices themselves have beentransformed or even obliterated by novelinstitutional arrangements.

Despite the weaknesses listed above, theanalyses put forward in each of the booksunder review are insightful and significant,and I strongly recommend them to studentsof social change in post-communist societies.

ReferencesBurawoy, Michael, and Pavel Krotov. 1992. “The

Soviet Transition from Socialism to Capitalism:Worker Control and Economic Bargaining inthe Wood Industry.” American SociologicalReview 57 (1): 16–38.

Frye, Timothy. 2006. “Original Sin, Good Works,and Property Rights in Russia.” World Politics58 (4): 479–504.

Gaddy, Clifford G., and Barry W. Ickes. 2002. Rus-sia’s Virtual Economy. Washington, D.C.: Brook-ings Institution Press.

Gel’man, Vladimir. 2004. “The Unrule of Law inthe Making: The Politics of Informal InstitutionBuilding in Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies 56 (7):1021–1040.

Hanson, Philip. 2003. “The Russian EconomicRecovery: Do Four Years of Growth Tell UsThat the Fundamentals Have Changed?”Europe-Asia Studies 55 (3): 365–382.

King, Lawrence. 2003. “Shock Privatization: TheEffects of Rapid Large-Scale Privatization onEnterprise Restructuring.” Politics and Society31 (1): 3–30.

Pahl, R. E. 1984. Divisions of Labor. Oxford: Black-well.

Volkov, Vadim. 1999. “Violent Entrepreneurshipin Post-Communist Russia.” Europe-Asia Stud-ies 51 (5): 741–54.

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.326 pp. $27.50 cloth. ISBN:9780300119091.

The Culture of the New Capitalism, byRichard Sennett. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 2006. 214 pp. $15.00paper. ISBN: 9780300119923.

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ers on the virtues of craftsmanship, Sennettmakes offhand remarks like, “Developmentsin high technology reflect an ancient modelfor craftsmanship, but the reality on theground is that people who aspire to be goodcraftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misun-derstood by social institutions” (p. 145). Ireally can’t agree; nor is it clear how or whyhe has come to these conclusions.

The Culture of the New Capitalism is themore explicitly sociological of the two books.In it, Sennett argues that the modern work-place is rotten to the core, that things justaren’t like they used to be. Modern work isfragmented, insecure, stressful, and unpre-dictable. Absent the guarantees of life-timeemployment and a steady-state career trajec-tory, workers have little incentive to be loyalto or trusting of their bosses, co-workers, andcorporate employers, and through this expe-rience, they retain little institutional knowl-edge of their places of work. These observa-tions are supported by loosely-documented“ethnographies” [his parlance] of contempo-rary white collar workers, who complain,whine, and worry to Sennett’s satisfaction.“The light-switch anxiety of short-term con-tracts” deprives workers of self-respect, Sen-nett argues, though he fails to make clearwhether it is the tenure of the work or thetendentious economics of temporary unem-ployment that are at play here—i.e., is short-term work just as worrisome if it leads to ser-ial employment? Nor does Sennett say muchabout the effect any of this has on corporateperformance, let alone macro-economics orsocial structure. Fair warning: Americansociologists who study such questions don’tget much due either.

Sennett wisely notes the comparativeadvantage wealthy, well-resourced individ-uals have in the fight to find a sense of placein the modern economy, but in my estima-tion, he sorely overestimates the old-worldvalue of coming to “know about yourself inrelation to the frustrations or anger youexperienced in an anchored social reality out-side yourself” (p. 74, author’s emphasis) Saywhat? Bad jobs are good for you, so long asthey come with tenure?

Similarly, I do not know many people ofmy (30–40 something) generation whowould agree with a statement like, “the newwork world is too mobile for the desire to do

something well for its own sake .|.|.” (p.194). Excuse me? There are quite a few inde-pendent programmers, consultants, artists,educators, and service workers I’d like Pro-fessor Sennett to meet. This appears to be atheme in both books, one I find highlyunpalatable.

Much of the data upon which these booksare based comes from workplace ethnogra-phies performed by Sennett and an unnamedteam of research assistants over an unspeci-fied period of time. Much of it also appears tohave been conducted in England, whereSennett has taught off and on for the pastdecade. This might explain why some of theattitudes of his workplace respondents seemsurprising from an American point of view:hospital orderlies and low-level civil servantstell Sennett et al., for example, that they haveeschewed more lucrative work in the privatesector because of the superior social status ofworking for the public good (pp. 190–91).Should we take this at face value? Suchremarks might be evidence of significantcross-national variation in the ‘meaning’ ofwork—something Sennett hardly consid-ers—or they might simply indicate that Sen-nett is misinterpreting their motivations,which is my leaning. The non-commissionedarmy officers he spoke to may indeed betrading salary for status, but one wonders ifSennett’s “immigrants who change bedpansin run-down public hospitals” are not merelyputting a happy face on their limited jobprospects. There are simply too many omit-ted variables here to fairly judge Sennett’sclaims.

I am not the first sociologist to wish thatSennett made his causal arguments and sup-porting evidence more accessible. Recall theremarks of Claude Fisher, who, in this samejournal described Sennett’s epic Fall of PublicMan as, “yards of ruffles and lace in the formof tangential discourses, bright plumes ofairy allusions, gewgaws of esoterica, therouge and powder of rhetorical argument—all presented with a writing style that strutslike a peacock.”1 I like fine writing andappreciate Sennett’s learned, unconventionalstyle, but the social scientist in me has toagree that Sennett’s arguments about thetravesties of work in the modern economy

1 Contemporary Sociology, 7(2) (March, 1978): 163.

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tend to be neither terribly clear nor all thatconvincing.

A central theme here and in Sennett’s ear-lier work seems to be humankind’s psycho-social need to have an established place inthe social world, a legible map by which tointerpret signs and status orders. But unlikethe progenitor of this idea, Emile Durkheim,Sennett sees not organic solidarity in thefluid diversity of modern life but inexorablestress and anomie. In a world where identityis amorphous, polyglot, and [admittedly]narcissistic, there is only dizzying uncer-tainty in the transmogrifying abyss. Why livelife when it is not imminently predictable?Let me count the ways. .|.|.

Most troubling for this reader, however,are Sennett’s frequent assumptions about theworld of work gone-by. He observes in TheCraftsman, for example, “We found fewamong the [new economy] technicians whobelieved that they would be rewarded fordoing a good job for its own sake,” thusimplying that this wasn’t always the norm(p. 36). Did the eighteenth or nineteenth cen-tury avatars of low-level bureaucrats andtechnicians really find so much to love in thecounting houses and shop floors of yore?Sennett seems almost oblivious to the well-documented prevalence of dangerous,insalubrious working conditions, low wages,and underhanded management in the “oldcapitalist” workplace. Labor history receivesscant notice here—odd for a book aboutwork.

Sennett anticipates some of these objec-tions, and his arguments are finely wroughtand carefully assembled. For most sociolo-gists, the problem with both books will likelybe Sennett’s eclectic, ‘told you so’ approach.As in past works, Sennett finds grounds forhis claims in various and sundry places, fromGreek mythology and pragmatic philosophyto Hegel, Hobbes, and Heidegger. His chiefinterlocutor is Hannah Arendt. He talksoccasionally of vast amounts of time spent inthe field, but the lack of appendices or evendetailed footnotes makes the empiricalunderpinnings of all this work ratheropaque.

I am likely more sympathetic to Sennett’sepistemology than most sociologists, and yet,despite it all, I find these books ultimatelyunfulfilling. Put together, they amount to a

philosophically overburdened appeal forgood jobs and an abiding welfare state cou-pled with reasonable but under-specifiedadmonishments about the dangers of global-ization, corporate greed, and the erosion ofthe American middle class. Rarely am I will-ing to work so hard for this kind of payoff. Isuspect you, and your students, may feel thesame.

In both books, Sennett wears his heartvery much on his sleeve—The Culture of theNew Capitalism, in particular, is a transcrip-tion of the Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics,and Economics Sennett gave at Yale in 2004,and here he talks a great deal about hisyouthful optimism and the disappointmentsof the post-60s era. His political preferencesare self-evident, though masked behindmuch erudition. The Craftsman, too, seemsdeeply embedded in Sennett’s lifelong inter-est in music. He is a craftsman, even if hisexistential defense thereof comes up short.

As a working professional, Sennett wouldappear to embody many of the choicest ben-efits of the contemporary world of work—heholds multiple appointments at some of theworld’s leading universities; he is a skilledand active musician; he has written and pub-lished several novels; he is a citizen of theworld; and he has the leisure to profession-ally pursue his own interests at his own pace.For this reader (an acquaintance of Sen-nett’s), knowing this makes it a bit difficult tosubscribe to his dire accounts of “cutting-edge institutions, short and erratic in theirtime-frames,” institutions that inevitably andirreversibly “deprive people of narrativemovement.”2 (This is a perfect illustration ofSennett’s indirect style; by ‘narrative move-ment,’ he means simply that “events in timeconnect, experience accumulates.”) As a manwho manages to do many things at once, heseems a testament to the ability to bridgethese sorts of gaps.

Alternatively, one might read Sennett tobe arguing that tenure trumps all. Give mejob security, or give me death. That, at least,is an argument most academics can getbehind.

2 Culture of the New Capitalism, p. 183, author’semphasis.

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Two Thousand and Eight was the 40thanniversary of both the death of MartinLuther King, the wave of “race riots” that fol-lowed his assassination as well as the“Kerner Commission Report” that analyzedthe wave of 1967 “race riots” that hadoccurred in hundreds of cities across thenation during the previous year. The U.S. hasnot experienced so robust a wave of eventslike those ever since, and, as the authors ofthe books I discuss here suggest, the few andmostly isolated race riots that have occurredin the U.S. since differ in certain ways fromthose that composed the waves of the late1960s, as well as those that occurred beforeand during World War II. There have onlybeen a few of them, and are less likely to beembedded in waves; they also reflect newerethnic conflicts resulting from distinctivelate 20th century immigration patterns.

What is a “race riot?” Journalists thinkthey know one when they see one, and soci-ologists are always prominent among theusual suspects asked to make sense of themafter they happen—Charles S. Johnson’s TheNegro in Chicago remains a monument tosuch efforts. But, how much sense have wemade of them? Do either of these mono-graphs move our understanding forward inany notable way? Could we do any better atit with a theoretical approach? Max Hermanand Janet Abu-Lughod join a long phalanx ofsociologists who previously have marshaledtheir distinctive theoretical and empiricalskills toward the task of making sociologicalsense of “race riots.”

Each author expresses discomfort callingthe events they examine “race riots.” ForHerman a race riot is “an episode of wide-spread ethnic collective violence,” (p. 1) butin practice he limits himself to an analysisonly of the social context of locations of fatal-ities that occur in the cases he analyzes, anddoes not distinguish fatalities the result ofpolice action from those caused by partici-pants. Abu-Lughod borrows the distinctionbetween “major riot” and “mega-riot” fromprevious analysts who identify events based

on how many people are killed, how longthey last, how much property damage isrecorded and their geographic spread, andshe adds the requirement that the event “pittwo or more groups against one another onthe basis of putative racial/ethnic identities”(p. 12). She says of her choice of events “.|.|.all six .|.|. qualify as either mega-riots or(almost) major riots” (p. 12). It is worth not-ing that the wide variation among the riotsunder analysis is the extent to which theywere dominated by inter-ethnic conflict—many in the 1960s were dominated by con-flict between the police and black residents.

Nor is either author shackled by modestambitions: Herman says, “I will build a casefor a general theory of riot violence .|.|.” (p.37) and Abu-Lughod aims to examine “thechanging conditions of urban race relationsover time .|.|. explain variations in riots inthe three largest metropolitan regions .|.|.and differences in the way relevant city gov-ernment regimes have responded to sequen-tial outbreaks” (p. 8).

Both authors note that past work on raceriots has tended to consist of intensive casestudies of single events or of quantitativecomparisons of multiple events, each argu-ing instead for the advantages of a small Ncontrolled comparison approach—Hermanciting an earlier paper of Abu-Lughod’s indefense of his position—that each adopts,she analyzing seven riots and he six,although their logic of choice of events dif-fers. Following her earlier rich analyses of

From Race Riot to Collective ViolenceJOHN D. MCCARTHY

Pennsylvania State Universityjxm516@psu.edu

Race, Space and Riots in Chicago, New Yorkand Los Angeles, by Janet L. Abu-Lughod.New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.344pp. $35.00 cloth. IBSN: 9780195328752.

Fighting in the Streets: Ethnic Succession andUrban Unrest in Twentieth-CenturyAmerica, by Max Arthur Herman. NewYork: Peter Lang, 2006. 184pp. $29.95paper. IBSN: 9780820474557.

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what she terms America’s global cities—shepicks events that occurred in those cities:New York (1935, 1943, and 1964), Chicago(1919 and 1968) and Los Angeles (1965 and1992). Herman picks two riots from theWorld War era (Chicago in 1919 and Detroitin 1943), two from the 1960s (Detriot in 1967and Newark in 1967) and two from the morerecent period (Miami in 1980 and Los Ange-les in 1992). Herman has chosen riots withhigh fatality rates driven, I suspect, by thelogic of his quantitative analyses, while Abu-Lughod, in spite of her purported focus onmega- and major-riots is forced to choosesome less severe events (in Chicago and NewYork) given her constrained choice of cities.

The three roughly bounded historical riotperiods represented here (WWI to the end ofWWII, the 1960s, and the late 20th century)reflect three distinct phases in ethnic migra-tion to U.S. cities, and also a shift from whiteon black violence in the first period to blackconfrontation with authorities and mer-chants in the second to more complex inter-ethnic and anti-authority violence in thethird. And, ethnic residential patterns, ethnicsuccession, and residential segregation figureprominently in the theoretical tool kit of bothauthors.

Past riot studies have focused, at the riskof over simplification, upon a few centralquestions: 1) when and where have they hap-pened? 2) how severe are they when theyoccurred? 3) what patterns of behavior arecommon during riots and how can that vari-ation be explained? The small N approach ofthese two authors is particularly unsuited toanswering the first question, but then, theefforts of large N researchers to answer itwith the extensive evidence accumulatedfrom the 1960s cycle of riots have yieldedrather modest results too, led by the unsur-prising finding that cites with large African-American populations and more residentialsegregation were more prone to having asevere riot. The small N approach offersmore promise in helping to frame answers tothe other two questions, but the common dif-ficulties of theoretical over specification sug-gest caution in interpreting comparisons.

Both authors theoretically privilege spacein their analyses, and each invests great effortin detailed accounts comparing the distinctgeographical features of the cities they exam-

ine, and especially the shifting residentialpatterns of ethnic succession. Both books arelaced with detailed maps of the several riotcities. Such backdrops allow highly nuancednarrative analyses of patterns of collectivebehavior and collective violence during riotsas they unfold, but only Abu-Lughod takesany advantage of them. Unfortunately nei-ther author, after all of the details have beenparsed, provides a convincing general empir-ical claim about how variations in spatialconfigurations across the cities they analyzeshape the collective behavior of the police orparticipants during the riots, let alone theirlikelihood or severity.

Herman’s analyses proceed by systemati-cally establishing the theoretical basis foreach of an extensive series of explanatoryvariables (including ethnic composition, suc-cession, competition, economic deprivation,and residential segregation) and then relat-ing values on these measures with either thepresence of fatalities or the number of fatali-ties—the occurrence of deadly violence—in acensus tract in each city during the riot underconsideration. So, at heart Herman seeks toexplain the differential likelihood and sever-ity of attacks against persons among censustracts within cities that experienced mega-riots. In what appears to be a not very muchrevised dissertation, he diligently completesthree independent statistical analyses (dif-ference of means tests, Poisson Regressionestimates, and Linear Regression estimates—controlling for autocorrelations) of each ofthe six data sets he has assembled. Thedetails of his many analyses are so numerousthis reader struggled to grasp any consistentpattern in the results suggesting any newunderstanding of riot severity, let alone adecisive adjudication of rival theories of it.As best as I can determine, his conclusionsare consistent with the tradition of modestresults brought home by the large N riotresearchers, and also consistent with pastresults in that he struggled to find any effectof economic deprivation on the likelihood ofdeadly violence. In the end he offers littleinsight into the mechanisms by which thesocial context of a census tract could lead toa riot fatality, a common failing, of course, ofmost large N studies of race riots.

Abu-Lughod’s approach is more discur-sive, and the questions that motivate her

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analyses more diffuse revolving around themany dimensions of race relations in herthree cities. She says, “.|.|. my goal is neitherto identify multiple causes nor measure theirrelative importance. I assume that theseunderlying ‘causes’ of racial strife are fairlyuniversal and known .|.|.” (p. 8). And saysas well, “I use these events as ways to under-stand more deeply .|.|. [the] ‘Americandilemma’” (p. viii). Nevertheless, in my judg-ment, she succeeds in sketching the outlinesof several interesting new directions ofanalysis that, if pursued more systematically,could help move forward our understandingof the several questions that have motivatedprevious riot researchers.

Abu-Lughod’s summary chapter is drivenby Kenneth Clark’s observation in 1955,“The wonder is that there have been so fewriots.” She continually expresses amazementthat there have not been more race riots andespecially, why none after Martin LutherKing Jr.’s assassination or the Rodney Kingincident in her city of residence, New York.Trying to account for the New York counter-factual as well as why race riots have been sorare in other cities in recent decades, shemoves the discussion of riot likelihood andseverity in promising new theoretical direc-tions, neither of which, unfortunately, isdeveloped very systematically. Variationover time and between cities in rates of theincarceration of the ethnic underclass as wellas variable patterns in policing strategy andtactics, offer great promise as factors account-ing for variation in both the likelihood andseverity of riots, as well as patterns of collec-tive behavior within riots. In posing theseaccounts, though, she pretty much ignoresthe rich literatures that have developed inrecent years around trends in police behavior(giving a nod to the emergence of commu-nity policing but completely missing theextensive work on the evolution of protestpolicing) and trends in incarceration andtheir community impacts (pointing to theobvious consequences of the enormous rate

of incarceration of young black males for thenumber of potential riot participants in acommunity, but ignoring the potentiallyexacerbating consequences on riot potentialof the associated high rates of disenfran-chisement in the same communities).

American race riot scholarship escalateddramatically following the wave of riotsfour decades ago, and has perked up a bitnow and then in response to particularlynotable events like the L.A. riot in 1992. In themeantime, scholars pursuing the questionsthat motivated earlier race riot researchershave substantially broadened the theoreticaland empirical scope of their inquiriesthrough a focus upon collective behavior,including collective violence, in public gath-erings of all kinds. This broadening was ledby scholars like Charles Tilly and ClarkMcPhail who had struggled early in theircareers to make sense of evidence from the1960s wave of race riots. This theoreticalmove was accompanied by another thatbrought the many forms of state repressionto greater prominence as factors thought toshape variation in collective violence.Younger researchers working within thisbroader conceptualization, then, conceiverace riots as but one instance of the muchlarger phenomenon of collective violence, tobe explained with theoretical tools appropri-ate far beyond the historically specific Amer-ican urban context of the late twentieth cen-tury, including especially processes of ethnicmobilization. Neither Herman nor Abu-Lughod engages much of this more recentscholarship on collective violence, most sur-prisingly by each ignoring Charles Tilly’sdiverse and extensive contributions. As aresult, I expect their work will find a far nar-rower audience. Nevertheless, each makes amodest contribution to the long, if nowmostly moribund tradition of race riot schol-arship. Their work, in turn, can and shouldbe incorporated into the expanding stream ofcollective violence research by those willingto make the effort.

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The candidacy of Barack Obama has ledsome commentators to proclaim that theUnited States is now a “post-racial” society.But recent survey data suggest another story.In late-June 2008, a Washington Post-ABCNews poll found that nearly half of all Amer-icans thought that race relations were in “badshape” and that 3 in 10 acknowledge feelingsof racial prejudice (Cohen and Agriesta2008). And the differences between black andwhite attitudes were stark and profound. Inmid-July 2008, a New York Times/CBS Newspoll found that 4 in 10 blacks believed that noprogress in eliminating racial discriminationhad been made in recent years while fewerthan 2 in 10 whites thought the same(Nagourney and Thee 2008).

The present moment constitutes a bundleof contradictions in respect to racism. How isit possible to have persistent forms of racialinequality in a period in which colorblind-ness is the hegemonic racial ideology andmost whites claim that racism is no longerrelevant?

Both Feagin and Bonilla-Silva engagethese contradictions by specifying the natureof contemporary racism in the U.S. Charac-terized as systemic (Feagin) or structural(Bonilla-Silva), racism is seen by both authorsas a fundamental social fact, a constitutiveand highly resilient organizing principle thathas shaped US society both historically andin the present. In their respective accountsracism is both flexible and enduring, bothconsistent and variable.

In Systemic Racism, Feagin addresses racis-m’s comprehensive presence in US societyand continues his qualitative emphasis onthe lived reality of racism. The official ver-sion of the nation’s history goes to greatlengths to deny or at least minimize racism’sineluctable presence. Feagin’s approach isthe direct opposite. He shows how racialinjustice and oppression have pervaded

North American economic, political, andcultural life from the early moments of colo-nial history. He emphasizes the prolongedconsequences of racial slavery for the opera-tions of the labor system, the dynamics ofpolitical rule, and the very identities andideas we take for granted.

Feagin contrasts black and white experi-ences over three phases of US history: slav-ery, formal segregation and the contempo-rary epoch (more-or-less “post-civil rights”).Feagin and his collaborators have exploredcontemporary black and white experiencesof racism perhaps more deeply than anyoneelse; he draws extensively on that researchhere. He also delivers a devastating historicalindictment of the nation’s foundational whiteracial pathology, based on archival and sec-ondary research.

For Feagin the systematic quality of U.S.racism in the US derives from its accretionover time. Its accumulation of resources bycoercive means, its defense through violenceof those hoards of wealth,(taken-for-grantedpower), its rationalization (by whites) thatthese ill-gotten gains are somehow merited,supposedly the just rewards that superiorbeings could “naturally” claim .|.|., all con-tribute to the “systemic” logic of racism. Heproposes new theoretical terms to addressthese interlinked dimensions of racism: for

Thinking Through Race and RacismMICHAEL OMI

University of California, Berkeleyomi@berkeley.edu

HOWARD WINANTUniversity of California, Santa Barbara

hwinant@soc.ucsb.edu

Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression, byJoe R. Feagin. New York: Routledge,2006. 368pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN:9780415952781.

Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racismand the Persistence of Racial Inequality in theUnited States, 2nd ed, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Lanham, MD: Rowman andLittlefield, 2007. 288pp. $27.95 paper.ISBN: 9780742546868.

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example drawing on psychiatric theory heintroduces the idea of “social alexithymia,”which he defines as “the sustained inabilityto relate to and understand the suffering ofthose who are oppressed” (p. 27–28). Withthis concept he seeks to go beyond “individ-ualistic interpretations” of racism to high-light the social consensus on which it relies.

To be sure, Feagin is also attentive towhites; he analyzes their part in systemicracism as well. What in earlier periods of UShistory took the form of explicit oppression,violence, and white supremacy now operatesdifferently: it is about whites averting theirgaze from the suffering that racism causes,denying it systematically, day after day.

Bonilla-Silva’s approach in Racism WithoutRacists concentrates on this last point: onwhites and whiteness in the “post-civilrights” era. Like Feagin he wants to craft acomprehensive theory of US racism: to hismuch-discussed “structural interpretation”(1997), he now adds a book-length account ofracism as ideology. Drawing upon extensiveinterview data with respondents, he interro-gates white racial attitudes in the present. Hisdiscursive analysis looks at the “frames,”“styles,” and “stories” that whites employ tomake sense of their relations with non-whitesand their explanations for existing racialinequalities.

“Frames” are the central features of thecurrently dominant racial ideology of color-blindness; they “set paths for interpretinginformation” (p. 26). Bonilla-Silva identifiesfour central frames: abstract liberalism, nat-uralization, cultural racism, and minimiza-tion of racism (p. 28–30). “Styles” are lin-guistic manners and rhetorical strategies likeavoidance and projection that distinguishforms of race talk (p. 53). “Stories” can be“socially shared tales that are fable-like andincorporate a common scheme and word-ing,” or they can be “accounts,” in the case oftestimonies, “in which the narrator is a cen-tral participant in the story” (p. 76).

Bonilla-Silva’s approach of dissectingracist ideology in practice allows him tointerrogate and debunk the key tropes ofcolor-blind racism. Bonilla-Silva concludesthat white racism (and color-blind racismtoday) forms an “impregnable yet elastic ide-ological wall” (p. 211). The resilience ofracist ideology is a product of its centrality in

American life; it is also the reason for racism’sdurability into the present and perhapsfuture as well.

Bonilla-Silva’s research gaze is largelytrained on whites: on their often inconsistentand usually self-serving efforts to narra-tivize their racism in the post-civil rights era.Most often he is right on target as he unpacksthe prejudiced attitudes and discriminatorypractices that belie many whites’ professionsof “color-blindness” and endorsements ofracial equality. While he is understandablysuspicious of white responses, Bonilla-Silvacan, at times, be tendentious and abrupt inhis interpretations of their views, ignoringtheir confusions and uncertainties, overlyeager to condemn.

The book’s tone is hortatory, but at thesame time Bonilla-Silva tries to take some ofthe edge off by recognizing some practicalrealities: that blacks can practice color-blindracism too (although blacks are much moreresistant to its myths than whites) and thatsome whites are progressive (Bonilla-Silvafinds young, working-class, white womenless susceptible to color-blind racism thanother whites). His critical voice is a tonic inmany ways; his style constitutes a refreshingbreak from the academese that pervades therace literature, and his often humorousasides help underscore rather than detractfrom his substantive points.

Feagin and Bonilla-Silva uncover newdimensions both of the experience of racialoppression, and of the experience of denyingit. Feagin is ever the inveterate interviewerand experimenter, determined to strip awaythe abstract conceptual apparatus throughwhich many Americans think about racism.He reveals the interconnections of the racist“system” with great insight. His work forcesus to contemplate concrete situations of dis-crimination, contempt, and violence and theways they are experienced by those on thereceiving end. Bonilla-Silva brings his early(and controversial) structural approachdown to the level of experience, drawingbriefly from Bourdieu to argue that there is awhite “habitus,” but arguing that whitesremain oblivious to its racial character andstructure. His exposure of the vapidity of thewhite experience of racism—its self-justifica-tion, avoidance, aversion, and self-decep-tion—cannot be beat.

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Although these works are each indis-pensable in their own way, they have impor-tant limitations as well. We propose four crit-ical points here: the limits of bipolarapproaches to racism; the limits of racialessentialism, the centrality of racial politics,and the importance of racial theory.

Predominantly concerned with the black-white racial dynamic, Feagin only lightlyaddresses racism as it affects other groups,principally Latinas and Asians, who receiveattention only in a “Reprise and Reassess-ment” chapter at the end of Systemic Racism.As Feagin well knows, demographic shiftsare remaking the U.S. today; indeed theAmerican people are in transition toward a“majority-minority” condition. Predicted atthe national level for c. 2050, but alreadymuch in evidence locally and regionally (forexample in California, which is now 57 per-cent nonwhite), the dawning of racial multi-polarity calls into question the black-whitebipolarity that grounds Feagin’s approach.(Feagin has co-authored a more recent bookwith Rosalind S. Chou [2008], that addressessome of these issues).

Bonilla-Silva also generally sees racism asa white phenomenon, directed largely atblacks. But he devotes a chapter to the ques-tion of the growing Latina population of theU.S., and what this means for patterns ofracism. In a number of other recent writingsas well, Bonilla-Silva argues that the U.S. isentering a period of transition toward amore Latin American system of racism: onein which racial classification, and concomi-tantly racial advantage or disadvantage, willbecome more continuum-based and lessbased on the black-white color-line. But hehas not offered much evidence to supportthis claim beyond the demographic shiftalready mentioned. In brief, there is someuncertainty in these two books on the ques-tion of racial bipolarity vs. racial multipolar-ity. This echoes an ongoing debate, one toolarge to engage here, about the location andnature of contemporary U.S. racial conflict(see for example Steinberg 2007; Foner andFredrickson, eds. 2003).

Neither Feagin nor Bonilla-Silva reallyaddresses the flexibility and instability, thecontradictory qualities, and particularly thepolitical conflicts, that shape U.S. racism andracial dynamics today. For all the strengths of

the accretion model of structural racism—fully articulated in Feagin’s book and dis-cussed in Bonilla-Silva’s 1997 ASR piece—anover-reliance on structural racism tends toessentialize racial difference, notably black-white difference. It reduces racism to a two-dimensional framework of winners andlosers, in whose contemporary variant blacksmainly suffer injustice and whites mainlydeny their racial privilege. Variations fromthis script are exceptions: the rare cases ofwhites who accurately understand and chal-lenge racism, and the occasional cases ofblacks who succumb to it or collude with it.

How accurate is this essentialist picture?We have no desire to portray US society as“postracist” or “color-blind,” yet the verynecessity of divulgating a “color-blind” racialideology itself demonstrates that deep fis-sures have appeared in the “system” ofracism, and that it is as not monolithic asboth authors have suggested (see Feagin’sfigure 1, p. 17). For Bonilla-Silva, the critiqueof “color-blindness” all too often devolvesinto attacks on “whiteness” per se. “White-ness must be challenged wherever it exists,”he says in his conclusion chapter (p. 214),echoing the “race traitor” school that hascalled for the “abolition” of whiteness. Weare critical of this position, not only becauseit can be politically self-defeating but alsobecause of its theoretical impoverishment:we understand race to be a relationshipoperating both between individuals andgroups, and also within individuals andgroups. “Color-blindness” may be littlemore than a form of antiracism “lite,” but thefact that millions of whites (and not onlywhites) identify with this idea, and the factthat many whites have adopted a more seri-ous antiracism—many students for example,cultural workers, “movement people,” etc.,who cannot be dismissed as mere tokens orexceptions—clearly calls into question therigidities both of Feagin’s systemic modeland Bonilla-Silva’s underlying structuralapproach.

Anti-essentialism is needed to understandnot only whites’ contradictory positions, butalso those of blacks and other “minorities.”Today for a great variety of reasons—thesuccessful incorporation of millions of blacksand other racially-defined “minorities,” theestablishment of real avenues for their social

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mobility, and the institutionalization offamiliar models of inclusion such as “diver-sity,” “multiculturalism,” and “ethnic stud-ies”—post-civil rights era racial reforms havebecome indispensable dimensions of politicallegitimation. These reforms, inadequate andsuspect as they remain, are also ameliora-tions of a formerly far more despotic racialsystem. They are thus profoundly contradic-tory phenomena: they embody importantconcessions but can also defuse and incorpo-rate antiracist challenges to the racial system.These transformations cannot be dismissedas mere tokenism (Barack Obama onceagain?), but neither should their significancebe exaggerated: their main effect is still theincorporation of black and brown elites, notthe alteration of basic patterns of racialinequality (Frazier 1957).

Conflictual racial politics are much morepervasive and influential than our two dis-tinguished studies of systemic (or structural)racism recognize. The real but limited demo-cratic victories of the black movement and itsallies have been crudely and inaccuratelyrearticulated as the “end of racism” through-out U.S. society. But is that the end of thestory? Efforts to lessen racial inequality andachieve greater racial justice continue todayin a host of arenas: in electoral politics, con-flicts over schooling, policing, imprisonment,immigration, and labor rights, to name but afew. Despite such tragedies and defeats asKatrina and the upsurge in anti-immigrantnativism, the political process remains asalient and perhaps growing arena for thecontestation of racism. Systemic Racism paysinadequate attention to this multivalentsphere of struggle between racial injusticeand “freedom dreams.” Racism WithoutRacists neglects the Duboisian legacy of“double consciousness,” a framework forthinking about racism that in the “post-civilrights” era applies not only to blacks, but toall groups in American society.

While providing insightful analyses ofracism, neither author devotes much atten-tion to the peculiarly problematic concept ofrace itself. For both Feagin and Bonilla-Silvathe concept of race is so mired in the prob-lem of inequality that race cannot be distin-guished from racism. For example Bonilla-Silva says that he “.|.|. conceive[s] society’sracial structure as the totality of the social rela-

tions and practices that reinforce white privilege”(p. 9; emphasis original). Where does thatleave antiracist relations and practices? Howdoes it account for black (or brown, or red,or yellow, or even white) identities and sol-idarities? Is everything about winning andlosing?

If we want to develop an adequateaccount of contemporary, post-civil rightsera conflicts between the still-unrealized rad-ical democratic aspirations of people of color(and their white allies) on the one hand, andthe increasingly desperate attempts to shoreup a despotic racial order on the part of whiteelites (and some nonwhite allies) on theother, we have to theorize not only racismbut race as well. How does the concept/prac-tice of racial identification and solidarity con-tinue to operate so strongly in the face of asophisticated effort, based in the racial state,to replace it with “color-blindness” and“post-raciality”? What accounts for thenational, as well as the global forms of racialsolidarity we see today? In what ways doesrace-consciousness inform and foster newforms of “intersectional” political activity, forexample in the Justice for Janitors movement,in women-of-color movements, in culturalpolitics (Lipsitz 2007), or in environmentalmovements that address racism (Bullard1993; Sze 2006). These questions, and a hostof other parallel ones, remind us that themeaning of race itself, and the process ofracial formation, cannot be reduced to theproblem of racism, pressing as that is.

Feagin and Bonilla-Silva have performedvaluable services in tracing the history ofracism, in exploring its consequences, and indemystifying its rationalizations, not onlyhistorically but in its contemporary regroov-ing as color-blindness and its psychopathol-ogy (Feagin’s alexithymia, Bonilla-Silva’s“frames”). None of these critical commentsare meant to diminish those achievements.

Yet struggles over the meaning of race,both in large-scale political structures and ineveryday experience and identity, remaininseparable from struggles against racism.For this reason we continue to insist thatattention be paid to racial formationprocesses; these are the sociopolitical con-texts in which racism is practiced and racialstructures are built, but they are also neces-sarily the arenas in which racism is con-

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Change can be most unpredictable. Ameri-can boomers were still in elementary schoolwhen preparations for the Second VaticanCouncil called by Pope John XXIII began in1959. Once the far-flung bishops gathered,unexpected ideas prevailed that altered thereligious activities and visions of AmericanCatholics that, in turn, shaped their familiesand local lives. Melissa Wilde documentsdramatically and convincingly how theCouncil’s partial break with Catholic theo-logical tradition over ecumenism, liturgy,and the status of Mary in the church was theresult of different cultural and political chal-lenges within the bishops’ home countriesand specific organizational skills of Councilactors. It is, of course, not the only event thatimpelled change in the West’s view of itself.

In the mid nineteen-sixties the civil rightsmovement, followed by protests against theVietnam War, fostered an anti-authoritarianfeeling fed by the women’s movement andgay liberation, coalescing into experimentalrelationships we call the counterculture. Thebaby boomers are defined in great part by theimpact of these events, which in turnchanged their religious practices and a rangeof other life choices. In After the Baby Boomers,Robert Wuthnow carefully documents the

impact of both parental choices and institu-tional and cultural changes on the children ofthis generation.

Focusing on different generations andusing different methodologies, the problemsaddressed by these two authors are con-nected by a central problematic in sociologyof religion, the changing nature and scope ofreligious authority. This lurching but contin-uing development in modernity must beplaced in the wider context of challenges toinstitutional authority.

To help understand the state of religionamong young adults today, Wuthnow intro-duces the concept of religious tinkering, orbricolage, a way to cobble together from anopen-ended, non-conditional scrap heap of

Authority versus Liberalism: Is There a Third Way?ELFRIEDE WEDAM

Loyola University Chicagoewedam@luc.edu

fronted and broken down. Only by openingup the political process much more, only bytaking it much more seriously, can we graspthe link between race and racism.

ReferencesBonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “Rethinking Racism:

Toward a Structural Interpretation.” AmericanSociological Review, 62: 465–480, 1997.

Bullard, Robert Doyle. Confronting EnvironmentalRacism: Voices From the Grassroots. Boston:South End Press, 1993.

Chou, Rosalind S. and Joe R. Feagin, The Myth ofthe Model Minority: Asian Americans FacingRacism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers,2008.

Cohen, Jon, and Jennifer Agiesta. “3 in 10 Ameri-cans Admit to Race Bias Survey Shows Age,

Too, May Affect Election Views.” WashingtonPost, June 22, 2008, page A1.

Foner, Nancy and George Fredrickson, eds. NotJust Black and White: Historical and ContemporaryPerspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicityin the United States. New York: Russell SageFoundation, 2004.

Frazier, E. Franklin. Black Bourgeoisie. Glencoe:Free Press ,1957.

Lipsitz, George. Footsteps in the Dark: The HiddenHistories of Popular Music. Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Nagourney, Adam and Megan Thee. “Poll FindsObama Isn’t Closing Divide on Race.” The NewYork Times, July 16, 2008, page A1.

Steinberg, Stephen. Race Relations: A Critique. Stan-ford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Sze, Julie. Noxious New York: The Racial Politics ofUrban Health and Environmental Justice. Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis ofReligious Change, by Melissa J. Wilde.Princeton University Press, 2007. 196pp.$35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780691118291.

After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- andThirty-Somethings are Shaping the Future ofAmerican Religion, by Robert Wuthnow.Princeton University Press, 2007. 298pp.$29.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780691127651.

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ideas (as he calls them) available to youngadults (aged 21–45), answers to perennialreligious questions (pp. 15, 135). In an uncer-tain and unsettled social climate (pp. 158–9),the tinkerer assembles a pastiche of resourcesthat may contain just enough material to sup-port a person until the next job decision orrelationship has to be negotiated. These con-ditions, different from those of their parentsand, with institutional religion’s tone-deafresponses, accounts for Wuthnow’s findingthat today’s young adults have lower rates ofreligious attendance and higher rates of dis-affiliation than their parents (p. 53). This hasalso affected evangelicalism, a movementheretofore seen as robust and growing (p.74). These conclusions are based on sec-ondary analysis of thirteen extant surveydatasets collected by Wuthnow and othersbetween the early nineteen-seventies andrecently, and augmented by 100 in-depthsemi-structured interviews collected for thisvolume.

The religious tinkering that Wuthnowdocuments is necessitated by a different ‘lifeworld,’ Habermas’ indicative concept, expe-rienced by today’s young adults. They havedelayed marriages; they have fewer childrenlater in life; they experience more uncertainjob and financial prospects; there is someincreased college training; there is a trendtoward fewer but also different social/civicrelationships; they have more internationaland intercultural exposure; and they access awide array of information via electronicmeans, including diverse artistic and culturalforms. All affect the level and content of theirreligious participation. These life worlds areweaker for religious participation, and con-gregations are generally (though not univer-sally) unaware of how to respond. For exam-ple, churches continue to cater to familieswith children, not to singles or those strug-gling with the new shape of employmentchallenges precipitated by globalization,migration, and deindustrialization. As aresult, Wuthnow argues that young peopleare forced to be individualistic because theylack the needed institutional infrastructure.Even for congregations alert to thesechanges, resources required to support awider array of constituents with more com-plex schedules and needs often exceed theirabilities to provide them (p. 225).

When young adults resort either to brico-lage—consulting peers, self-help manuals, orexotic spiritualism—or reject outright his-toric religious beliefs and practices, somemay claim this is all to the good. But the sec-ularization thesis has been challenged onempirical and substantive grounds. AsWuthnow points out “The raw brutality ofthe twentieth century, fraught by totalitari-anism and repeated wars and instances ofgenocide, was enough to cast doubt on argu-ments about the gradual triumph of reason”(p. 89). Or, as the philosopher Charles Taylorput it, while there are gains and losses in thechoice-making over religion, “many of theills for which ‘religion’ was supposedlyresponsible aren’t going away” (2007:770).

Over the course of much published work,Robert Wuthnow has quietly but steadilyresisted the application of rational choicetheory and marketplace logic to explainhow religious ideas affect individual deci-sions. This epistemological stance emergesclearly in After the Baby Boomers. While themarketplace metaphor emphasizes the pos-sibility of choice, it does not address thesocial factors that influence them (p. 157). Iwould argue further that the real limitationof rational choice theory lies in its inability tohelp us evaluate what is choice-worthy, asthe late political philosopher, Wilson CareyMcWilliams, once remarked.

The questions this book asks should notstop at why young adults don’t choose insti-tutional religious forms as often as their par-ents did and what churches could do aboutit, but should also ask why organized reli-gious forms are less socially legitimatedtoday than earlier. Indeed, if the persistenceof spirituality as a component in personalidentity indicates that modern persons areminimally curious about a transcendent real-ity, then the question is sociologically andnot just theologically important. Religiousinstitutions are pulling fewer young peopleinto their orbit, but equally powerful is thepush of young people away from the deci-sion-making legitimacy of religious world-views. One wishes that Wuthnow had ana-lyzed this push in more depth and detail.

I agree that the inertia of religious institu-tions is partly to blame, deaf to culturalchanges that appear evident all around, butyoung adults and their parents made choices

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whose consequences they did not anticipate.It is on this point that Wuthnow’s data leadsto some further speculations. Parentalauthority changed with the practices of thebaby boom generation. These parents placedmore emphasis on individual responsibilityand individual decision-making. The anti-authoritarianism of parents became the indi-vidualism of their children. In rejectingauthority, however, many boomers also lostcommunity, at least the kind of communitythat emerges from relationships of obliga-tion.

This raises other questions. Why is the lifeworld of young adults less open to the legit-imacy of religion? Is it because socially cor-rosive economic and political factors over-whelm individual control to such an extentthat resistance through religion seems laugh-able by comparison? This may be accurate toa degree. Alternatively, perhaps the legiti-macy of all mediating institutions, whichmay require both allegiances and obligations,has been undermined through the skepti-cism, cynicism, or arrogance of not just con-trolling elites, but all individuals. Wuthnowhints at this possibility—“religious partici-pation is influenced by the life worlds youngadults have created for themselves” (p. 70).

Modern persons no longer accept thebonds of authority that had been assumed asconstitutive of community life. Yet blending“individual, voluntary compliance to moraldictates that are not arbitrary,” as AdamSeligman (2000:41) references Durkheim’sproject, is not within reach. Indeed, the mod-ern individual has a different character. It isthe self as “an autonomous, atomistic, andself-regulating moral agent endowed withrights” and whose relationships “are basedon the mutual interests of the contractingparties” (2000:6). For Seligman this is unfor-tunate because “it makes it difficult for thesocial sciences and indeed for importantparts of philosophy to explain human actionin terms of anything but purely calculative,power-oriented acts of utility maximizationand corresponding notions of negotiationand exchange.”

In other words, choice-worthiness cannotbe decided shorn of, in Adam Seligman’s lan-guage, “sacred referents,” that is, “an author-itative and legitimizing matrix of action anddecision making” (2000:30) that cannot be

reduced to preference orientations. Wuth-now provides evidence that such views mustbe debated in light of how religious ideasand practices affect American societythrough political participation, social move-ment activity, and stances on personal moralissues such as abortion and homosexuality.

The trends documented by Robert Wuth-now point indirectly to the changing natureof religious authority, initially in its scope(Chaves 1994), but also in devolution frominstitutional to individual sources of author-ity and from vertical to horizontal negotia-tion of authority. While Vatican II is still anunfinished project, Melissa Wilde offersinsights into the institutional changes thataltered relationships between bishops andthe pope, which, in turn, changed the rela-tionship of lay Catholics to priestly authority.With primary data from newly opened Vati-can archives, she argues that the outcomes ofthe Council cannot be explained by typicalsociological factors such as money, power,interests, or popular pressure (p. 4). Instead,Wilde deftly incorporates theories fromsocial movement analysis, historical and cul-tural analysis, and economic factors into anorganizational analysis of institutionalchange. In so doing, she shows how the insti-tutional Catholic Church turned its shiparound by the successful efforts of progres-sive bishops to out-organize their conserva-tive opponents and, importantly, to do sobecause their ideas about what the churchneeded matched well with particular culturalenvironments which different groups ofbishops confronted in their home countries.In one way, this is a story of institutionaladaptation to social change. In another, it is acontinuation of the story about how author-ity in the Western context has been strikinglymodified.

The Council bishops decided early intheir deliberations they were not going to bea “rubber stamp” for positions enunciated bythe Curia in preparatory conciliar docu-ments. Nonetheless, the majority of bishopssupported certain reforms but not others.They instituted reforms over church doctrineand practices—ecumenism, liturgy, and therole of Mary. They left alone birth regulation,priestly celibacy, and women’s ordination.The differences appear to hinge on the “pub-lic” versus the “personal.” Wilde claims the

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timing and external context (challengeswithin the home countries of the bishops’‘organizational fields’) was less pressing forthe personal than for the public issues (p. 57).However, the institutional church has alsonot developed sufficient internal capacity toaddress issues over sex and gender.

Because councils are dogmatically bind-ing, they are rare. The Second Vatican Coun-cil was only the third council in 400 years andVatican I, 1869–1870, ended prematurelydue to the Franco-Prussian War. The FirstVatican Council instituted papal primacyand infallibility as a response to the destruc-tion of the ancien régime by the formation ofliberal states across Europe and the immi-nent loss of papal temporal sovereignty(D’Agostino 2004:11). As Gene Burns hasargued, Pope Pius IX acted to centralizechurch authority in the face of these losses(1992:58). However, since Vatican I wasunable to address the role of bishops in rela-tionship to the pope, one hundred years ofambiguity over teaching authority com-menced. On infallibility, most twentieth cen-tury Catholics absorbed an oddly shapedunderstanding of the pope’s infallibilitywhile speaking on faith and morals asfounded in historic tradition and connectedto a kind of divine right. As a result, rela-tionships with other Christian faith groupswere troubled and questions of legitimacyunsettled many bishops in increasingly plu-ralistic societies of Northern Europe andNorth America. To address these, Wildeshows how the progressive bishops’ “colle-gial” strategies of communication and deci-sion-making were more persuasive than theconservative approaches of hierarchy, tradi-tion, and centrality. The progressives wereable to mobilize a heterogeneous group ofbishops around their agenda on ecumenism,for example, even though the relationship ofCatholics to Protestant missionaries in LatinAmerica was not favorable toward it. Theresult was the transformative document,Declaration on Religious Freedom.

Indeed, the fulcrum of change at VaticanII lay in the views of progressive bishops thatthe teaching authority of the church wasshared with the pope—the doctrine knownas “collegiality.” While consensus buildingthrough regular meeting and informationsharing within episcopal conferences came to

define the Council (p. 64), the bishops couldachieve only a painful compromise on thedogma (Burns 1992: 58). While this providedpartial decentralization of church authority,it opened a new post-conciliar role for bish-ops through sanctioned episcopal structuresof national conferences and synods. The U.S.National Conference of Catholic Bishops’pastoral letters on peace and on economicjustice, as well as the Medellin and PueblaConferences on liberation theology by theLatin American bishops could not havereceived national and international audi-ences without their canonical status withinthe Church. However, their desired impacton and, therefore, their authoritative voiceregarding state policy, is not clear.

The vast implications for lay Catholics areclearly outside the scope of Wilde’s book buthave been profound and complex andresulted in considerable post-conciliar polit-ical conflict. A number of bishops retreatedfrom their progressive positions becausethey “grew fearful that the Council itselfwould lead to a secularization of Catholicismand a collapse of church authority” (Menozzi1987:327). An alternative vision calls formore lay participation and co-responsibility(Dulles 1987:354). This returns us toDurkheim’s problem. How does lay partici-pation combine to form authoritative struc-tures that are both voluntarily entered andresult in binding forms of moral culture? Theliberalism enjoyed by young adults and theirparents today—choice-making over norma-tive claims-making—does not produce legit-imate institutions of accountability nor isthere a principled way to evaluate the con-tent of their choices. Questions such as thedeleterious impact of laissez-faire capitalismon worldwide forms of inequality, as theNorth and South American bishops raised,are at stake; consequently, there may be con-siderable unease about how to achieve thegood society Americans desire.

ReferencesBurns, Gene. 1992. Frontiers of Catholicism: The Pol-

itics of Ideology in a Liberal World. Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press.

Chaves, Mark, 1994. “Secularization as DecliningReligious Authority” Social Forces, 72:3,1994:749–774.

D’Agostino, Peter. 2004. Rome in America: Transna-tional Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to

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A decade ago, when R. Stephen Warner andJudith Wittner edited Gatherings in Diaspora(1998) they could reasonably claim that thescholarly attention being paid to immigrants’religion and patterns of religiosity was unde-servedly underdeveloped. Immigrants andimmigration were booming as subjects forsociological investigation but mostly in termsof economic mobility, ethno-racial demo-graphic change, and cultural adaptation inareas such as language and heterogamy.

They could not claim that now. An explo-sion of work on immigration, immigrant reli-gion, and increasing religious diversity inAmerica has marked the last decade, andshows no sign of letting up. One can trace aclear development of this literature. Therewas a series of ethnographic reports, usuallyfocused on individual congregations or smallimmigrant communities. Usually this schol-arship studied the first generation of immi-grants—those who traveled to this countryand were most directly involved with creat-ing new lives, new institutions, and newidentities. The plurality, if not majority, ofthese studies were based in traditional immi-grant “hot spots”—primarily New York andLos Angeles. While that level and mode ofanalysis has continued, and continues to beintellectually profitable, studies of largercommunities, denominational structures,and surveys of populations (including atti-tudes of non-immigrant Americans) havealso developed, adding different perspec-tives, levels of analysis, and research meth-ods. Further, attention to the second genera-tion—those born in this country to

immigrant parents—is also increasingrapidly.

At the risk of eliding the nuances in thework of a great many interesting scholars, ageneral finding has emerged—immigrants tothe U.S., perhaps especially non-Christianimmigrants, use their religious institutions asa key site for negotiating their lives in a newworld (Joshi, in the book reviewed here, callsthe ethno-religious community a “thirdspace,” pp. 30–33). Religious organizationssimultaneously provide cultural connectionsto the homeland and a sense of identity con-tinuity; at the same time, immigrants learn tonavigate the U.S. both organizationally andculturally (as well as often benefiting eco-nomically from social networks). Americansare relatively tolerant of religious diversity

Transnational Religion and the Shaping of Politics, Ethnicity, and Culture

RHYS H. WILLIAMSUniversity of Cincinnati

Rhys.Williams@uc.edu

Fascism. Chapel Hill: University of North Car-olina Press.

Dulles, Avery. 1987. “The Reception of Vatican IIat the Extraordinary Synod of 1985” in Recep-tion of Vatican II. Giuseppe Alberigo, Jean-Pierre Jossua, and Joseph A. Komonchak, (eds.)Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press.

Menozzi, Daniele. 1987. “Opposition to the Coun-cil (1966–84)” in Reception of Vatican II.

Giuseppe Alberigo, Jean-Pierre Jossua, andJoseph A. Komonchak, (eds.). Washington,D.C.: Catholic University Press.

Seligman, Adam. 2000. Modernity’s Wager: Author-ity, the Self, and Transcendence. Princeton:Princeton University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.

New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground:Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in IndianAmerica, by Khyati Y. Joshi. NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,2006. 288pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN:0813538017.

A Place at the Multicultural Table: TheDevelopment of an American Hinduism, byPrema A. Kurien. New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 2007. 352pp.$26.95 paper. ISBN: 0813540569.

God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and theChanging American Religious Landscape, byPeggy Levitt. New York, NY: The NewPress, 2007. 288pp. $26.95 cloth. ISBN:9781595581693.

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and subscribe to a generic religious pluralism(at least in principle, if not always when amosque moves in next door). Thus, immi-grants take important steps toward “becom-ing Americans” in their religious organiza-tions, while maintaining community.

The next logical step in the developmentof scholarship on immigrant religion is tofocus not just on the communities as they aresettling here, but to examine the internationalflows of immigration and immigrants andstudy how those global processes are affect-ing immigrant life and religiosity—in bothsending and receiving societies. The ease andrapidity of geographical movement, andespecially of electronic communication, hasmade immigration less of a one-time eventthat results in isolation from the homeland orthat needs an ethno-religious third space tomaintain the home culture. That ideal-typicalisolation from the homeland has always var-ied among immigrant groups, (as PeggyLevitt notes); for example, shtetl Jews couldnot go back after fleeing pogroms, but “sec-ond wave” Italians often moved back andforth several times. Nonetheless, transporta-tion and communication developments havetightened the world, with cultural, economic,and political influences flowing in manydirections. Thus, immigrants are often not“on their own” here, rather, they influenceand are influenced by events in the home-land as well as in the U.S., and/or they par-ticipate in a “global religious community”where religious identity trumps national res-idence. Thus, we now have increasing atten-tion to “transnationalism” in the literature onimmigration and immigrant religion.

Three interesting books give us insightinto these more global religious phenomena,but in differing ways. Peggy Levitt uses“transnationalism” as her orienting frame,and specifically studies how identities getbuilt both in the U.S. and in the sending com-munity as people use cultural tools from bothsocieties. Prema Kurien examines the cre-ation of an “American Hinduism,” andshows clearly how that process has had amajor effect on the development and direc-tion of Hindu nationalist politics in India,and the development of what might betermed a transnational political movement.Khyati Joshi analyzes the complex ways inwhich religion is intertwined with ethnicity

and racial identity for second-generationIndian Americans. In each case the transna-tional flow of religion—as a symbolic mean-ing system, as a set of lived practices, or as aninstitutional framework—has consequencesfor other societal developments, whether itbe social diversity, sectarian politics, or pub-lic identities.

Transnational Religious FlowsPeggy Levitt’s work follows up on her The

Transnational Villagers (2001) by examiningthe lives of four groups of people, Muslimsfrom Pakistan, Hindus from India, Catholicsfrom Ireland, and Protestants from Brazil—each of whom has a vibrant immigrant reli-gious community in the greater Boston area.She does interviews in both the U.S. and inthe sending communities, studying how thetransnational religious exchanges, and otherexchanges of what she calls “social remit-tances” (p. 64) shape religious as well asnational identities. Levitt is particularly inter-ested in putting America’s changing reli-gious landscape—and the challenge of truereligious pluralism—in the context of globalpopulation and cultural flows. This is a bookwith a clear normative message, arguing forthe benefits of an engaged pluralism for theU.S. and for sending nations.

Importantly, while Levitt brings to hercase a keen understanding of the ways inwhich transnationalism poses challenges fornational identity and the notion of a nationalvs. a “cosmopolitan” citizenship, she alsofinds people for whom “God needs no pass-port”—that is, they construct themselves asmembers first and foremost as global reli-gious citizens. The existence of internationalreligious organizations (e.g., the CatholicChurch or the Hindu International Swami-narayan Satsang Organization, ISSO) andtransnational ideals (e.g., the Muslimummah), combine with the improved abilityto access co-religionists and religious experi-ences in places other than one’s residence tomake this more than just a rhetorical aspira-tion. Many of her respondents are “de-local-ized” (my term) in their religious lives andtheir sense of citizenship, with importantimplications for other aspects of their socialexistence.

Prema Kurien’s book is the product ofyears of ethnographic observation with 12Hindu organizations in the U.S., and follows

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on her excellent Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity (2002).She also did interviews, and made valuableuse of web-based data. The development andexpansion of the web has been both a chal-lenge and an opportunity to manyresearchers. Particularly for those studyingSouth Asian populations it is important.India is increasingly “wired,” with thoseindustries contributing greatly to India’s cur-rent economic expansion; Indians in the U.S.are highly concentrated in high tech indus-tries. And the organizing of Hindu national-ist politics, and its international communica-tion, has made great use of the web. ForKurien this was an essential data source andinteractional site.

Kurien’s main subject is the developmentof an American Hinduism, and to do so shestudies organizations that represent what shecalls “popular” Hinduism, organizations thatpromote an “official” Hinduism, and therelations between them. Without the type ofclergy or ecclesiastical structure common toAbrahamic religions, and with the widediversity of Hindu practices, Indian Ameri-cans often have little formal knowledge ofHinduism. They use Indian sources orimported gurus, mixed with their particularpractices, to learn about their religion, even-tually build temples, and raise their familiesin the faith. Some of this knowledge camewith a “Hindutva” perspective—the demandfor an ethno-nationalist, established HinduIndia. Thus, the institutionalization of Hin-duism as a means to express an ethnicIndian-American identity has led to the reli-gion’s politicization, and the ethnic forma-tion of Hindu Indian-Americans has gener-ated deeper bonds with the homelandthrough transnational connections (particu-larly for a second generation who has lessdirect experience of India).

And yet, these developments in the U.S.have reverberated within the religious andpolitical worlds of India. The experience ofbeing a racialized and religious minority inthe U.S., and the American language of plu-ralism and multiculturalism, all provide cul-tural resources for a militant ethno-national-ism. Hinduism’s tolerance and pluralism iscelebrated as evidence for its superiority ofthe “intolerant” religions of Islam and Chris-tianity. As Hinduism became more formal-ized and standardized as a religion through

its encounter with Western colonialism andAbrahamic faiths, so does Hindutva ideol-ogy reflect the experiences of diasporicHindu Indians. Thus, like Levitt, Kurienfinds a type of “transnational” citizen, yetone who often proffers an ethno-nationalistnotion of religious identity.

Khyati Joshi conducted forty-one inter-views with second-generation Indian Amer-icans in Boston and Atlanta. Most are Hindubut there are also Muslims, Sikhs, Christians,and some with no religious identity. Joshi isfundamentally interested in how religionweaves in and out of the development ofethnic identity among her respondents. Joshifocuses on “lived religion”—the subjectiveand everyday experience of religion, and theacculturated worldview that comes throughfamily and peer socialization. In this sense,Joshi treats religion as a more stable and in-grained aspect of life and development thanis typical in American sociology (or in Amer-ican culture, with its ethos of voluntarism). Incontrast, Joshi constructs ethnicity and raceas changeable over time: “the view that race[is] immutable and religion [is] flexible hin-ders our analysis” (p. 9). As both racial andreligious minorities, Indian Americans faceracial classification in the U.S. unknown tothem in their homeland. As second-genera-tion Indian Americans work to establishways to be Hindu, or Muslim, or Sikh in thiscountry, it deeply affects and interacts withtheir understandings of themselves as“Indian” and is intertwined with their socialracial identity.

Joshi makes “Indian” the key analytic cat-egory, and considers “lived religion” as alargely undifferentiated, rather than sectar-ian, category. However, it may well be thatdifferent religious traditions affect ethnicidentity in different ways. If we believeKurien’s analysis of how Hinduism is devel-oping in the U.S., then its distinctions fromIslam are becoming more important thanever. Nonetheless, Joshi finds significantconflation of Hinduism with Indian culture,even among non-Hindu respondents. Butthat conflation does not always apply to theirsense of their own “Indianness.” Joshi’srespondents combine, in a wide variety ofways, religious, cultural, ethnic, and politicalideas and symbols to find meaningful per-

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sonal identities and align them—or not—with larger political fields.

Transnational Religion and BeyondIt is important to understand how religion

and religiosity change in new societal envi-ronments. Religion is a major institution andsystem of social meaning in much of theworld and understanding its transformationsis a key to understanding both causes andconsequences of social change. However, Iam more intrigued with the insights thesebooks offer into the mix of religion, culture,ethnicity, and national identity. Unlike Chris-tianity, Islam, or even Buddhism, Hinduismis not a “universalist” religion. There is not adoctrinal precept that its religious truth ispotentially available to all persons, no mattertheir nationality or ethnicity. For many, Hin-duism remains “ethnic;” indeed, for cen-turies Hinduism was not, as such, a separate“religion”—it was merely the spiritualexpression of Indian people. And, given thatIndia, and a sense of “Indian” identity, is areasonably recent phenomenon compared tothe time humans have been on the sub-con-tinent, Hinduism has been highly differenti-ated, varying widely by region and practice.

Due to these aspects of Hinduism (andIndia) it is tempting to think that theprocesses illuminated by Levitt, Kurien, andJoshi are interesting, but with perhaps nottoo much direct implication for the U.S.—beyond the clear effects on the American reli-gious topography. Because of Hinduism’soften-amorphous history, and the long expe-rience with colonialism, this wrestling withreligion, ethnicity, and national identity maybe regarded as a particularly Indian issue.But I think not. One of Kurien’s most impor-tant points is establishing the extent to whichIndian Hindus in the U.S. are transformingHinduism in India. Nationalist politics andsectarian rivalries in India are emphasizingthe connections between Indian culture andHindu identity, to be sure, but they are mak-ing it exclusive—to be Indian is to beHindu—as they are standardizing Hinduismso that it resembles a more Western religion.American religion and culture are implicatedin this process, as these transnationalexchanges play a role in homogenizing theworld. And yet, Levitt specifies her use of“transnational” rather than “global” in orderto emphasize differentiation and synthetic

particularism rather than homogenizingstandardization. Is there a disagreement hereabout which one can determine who is rightor wrong?

Again, I think not. Part of the difference isa levels-of-analysis issue—Levitt is examin-ing the subjective experiences of people con-structing identities while Kurien’s insightsinclude an examination of how “official”Hinduism and attendant religion-nationalistideas are working at a wider cultural andpolitical level. But these books also give usinsight into the currently celebrated socio-logical processes of symbolic boundary con-struction, definition, and maintenance. Anyboundary emphasizes some differenceswhile minimizing others. Identities are cre-ated as distinctions are established; so, as thedifferences between Islam and Hinduism areaccentuated and normatively ordered, thevariation among Hindus is suppressed.

So there are more general implicationsand lessons here for those not necessarilyinterested in Hinduism, India, or immigrantreligion. The tensions between religion andculture, between ethnic and national identity,between universalizing and particularizingimpulses, seem to be on full display in cur-rent U.S. public culture. We have a majorparty Presidential candidate whose racialidentity is decidedly boundary-spanning, afact with which our racialized culture strug-gles to accommodate—not just normativelybut conceptually. Relatedly, we have avibrant set of rumors and claims that ques-tion whether he is a Muslim—due to “evi-dence” gleaned from both family heritageand the ethnic origins of his name—despitehis widely known two decades of member-ship in a Christian church. Or, perhaps, inpart because of that membership, since thepastor of that church seems to be able to sep-arate his Christian identity from Americannational pride—something hard to imaginefor many Americans. And, perhaps mostrevealing, many of Barack Obama’s support-ers have defended him by calling the Muslimrumors a “smear”—not even using the oldSeinfeld line, “not that there’s anythingwrong with that .|.|.” The normative asso-ciation between Christianity and Americannational identity, and Anglo-Europeanethno-racial identity, permeates public poli-tics at a level that often seems impervious to

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our professed national stories of immigra-tion, pluralism, and American ideals.

Certainly there have been changes—it ishard to imagine Obama’s candidacy even adecade ago. But the current public politicaland culture scene in the U.S. seems to me tohelp reinforce a point found in these books,articulated most directly by Joshi. Religion isa “lived” experience and one deeply embed-ded in people’s lives. Changes in society, andchanges in personal circumstances, producechanges in the substance and function of reli-gious ideas, identities, and meanings. Atransnational world is introducing thosechanges at what often seems to be a dizzyingpace. But they butt up against the deeplyingrained ontologies and unexamined cul-tural assumptions that universalize and par-ticularize experience, often simultaneously.Getting close to the “ground” of people’s

lives can reveal profound changes—and alsohow those changes are simply incorporatedin ways that do not disturb fundamentalmeanings.

The challenges of, and to, a transnationalworld are admirably on display in thesethree interesting books. I recommend themsingly and collectively.

ReferencesKurien, Prema A. 2002. Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity:

International Migration and the Reconstruction ofCommunity Identities in India. New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers.Berkeley: The University of California Press.

Warner, R. Stephen and Judith Wittner, eds. 1998.Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communitiesand the New Immigration. Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press.

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