Life in debt. Book review

BOOK REVIEWS

Nathalie Koc-MenardUniversity of Cambridge

Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal ChileClara Han (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)

Life in Debt is about everyday life in the aftermath of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Situated inthe poblacion of La Pincoya, a shantytown in the outskirts of Santiago, Clara Han describesthe daily social and economic struggles of the urban poor. This is an excellent book, wellwritten, and organized in clear chapters, captivating the reader from beginning to end. Han hascarefully chosen her protagonists and details their daily battles as these conflicts are framedwithin complicated kinship relationships. In La Pincoya, these families are consumed by debt,low income, memories of the dictatorship, and health problems that make it difficult to achievea dignified life (una vida digna).

Han analyzes three aspects that are inextricably entangled in social life (particularly in theChilean socio-economic context): economy, health care, and a social debt toward those whohave suffered human rights violations. Despite this entanglement, Han represents each aspectseparately, problematizing each and granting readers a broad picture of life in La Pincoya. Theclever play on words between the book’s title and content refers to both the daily economic debtin which families live and the social debt of the Chilean state. The state owes its poor citizensfor the inequalities generated by its regime of economic liberalization. The 1990 change ofregime involved returning to democracy and the new regime advocated for human rights, butthe regime did not interfere with the problems of the established neoliberal economy. The pastis erased when there is no public recognition and discussion of the consequences of violenceand human rights violations on the everyday life of those who survived tortures and continuestruggling, now in a neoliberal economy.

Through an analysis of the economy of everyday life in La Pincoya, Han gives an intimateportrait of how families are overwhelmed by debts and low incomes, which contributes todomestic violence as well as drug abuse. She explores how economic debt has allowed peopleto achieve a dignified life, by improving their living conditions through certain commodities.However, her analysis does not look in detail at the meanings of consumption across genera-tions. For example, a father may achieve a dignified life, but what does it mean for the son tohave access to certain commodities? Pobladores from La Pincoya have acquired the status of“consumers” for the market and the state. Nevertheless, the topic is not fully discussed nor wasthere enough ethnographic data presented to explain how a flat-screen TV and a stereo makea person from La Pincoya a modern citizen in contemporary Chile. A deeper analysis wouldallow us to better comprehend relationships among different age-groups across Santiago.

Han describes the poverty programs expanded by the government in order to pay off thesocial debt of the Pinochet era. Addressing and tackling poverty is one of the main aspectsof reconciliation. The problems inherited from the past, like those related with Human Rightsviolations were not confronted during the transition government in the early 1990s. At the time,the national consensus was to render the past as debt, one that could be empirically accounted

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 36, Number 2, pps. 358–382. ISSN1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C© 2013 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12034.

November 2013 Page 359

for and paid through “a process of democratization and modernization” particularly to thepoorest groups (p. 57). Han argues that the new democratic government established the past asa moral debt in which the society achieves the pardon through the reconciliation among victims,perpetrator and witnesses. It becomes an arrangement about the past, through which life couldcontinue its normal course. Later in 2003 the state provided economic compensations for someof victims of torture (p. 103). Nevertheless, coercion and mass repression (allanamientos) wereexcluded from this compensation, producing within La Picoya’s pobladores a deeper sense ofliving a life of debt.

The author highlights the failures of some of these social programs. First, she finds that theyfocus primarily on women, intended to increase women’s autonomy from state networks.Second, these programs involve a conditional bonus given to poor families, with a monthlycheckup followed by a social worker. In some of these cases, clients hide their wealth and tryto appear poor to stay in the social program. Third, there have been 24 months of psychologicalworkshops in which men, and the rest of the household members, are excluded. For example,they are not compelled to attend workshops. The narrow vision of the state is compelling. Itapproaches and understands women as if they were the only agents who can reduce poverty,the only ones able to cut the supposed dependency their families have on social welfare.

Han provides a detailed account of her experience in a counselling group. Most of the “clients”use the counselling space to escape reality and do not necessarily follow the “healing pathways”established by the state (p. 65). These are women’s private spaces, where they forget debts andfamily problems; they are places of dreams and also, sometimes, of silence which could eitherbe positive or negative. The human and economic resources invested in these programs arehuge, but their impact is not significant because of the gap between what the state imaginespeople need and what the real needs of this population are. Here, within their daily struggles,the past cannot be erased as the state pretends. Memories of tortures, repression, and deathscannot be forgotten by the mind and are embodied.

Despite this ethnography’s skilful analysis, Han lacks a deeper discussion of the ethnographer’spresence in this poblacion. By placing bits of herself in the narrative, Han builds an ethnographyin which she is most of the time merely a witness. She is overly concerned with the impactshe may have on her relationships. When she witnesses one of her informants overdosingfrom antidepressants, Han intervenes by saying something, and the relationship changes. Hanrecognizes this as “crossing the line” (p. 224) but are not these interventions unavoidable duringlong periods of participant-observation? Willingly or not, the ethnographer crosses boundariescontinuously, shaping and reshaping close relationships.

Han’s presence itself has an impact in La Pincoya. It is hard to establish trust among theinhabitants of La Pincoya, and she has achieved this through years of work in the community.She does not portray herself in La Pincoya as a female American ethnographer but wasnonetheless probably seen as a well-off gringa and a source of money. In addition, there is nomention of anyone asking to receive or lend money throughout the book. It is not exceptionalto be asked for money, particularly when ethnographers work among low-income groups. It ishard to remain impartial to poverty and human suffering, and Han does not always address thetoll it takes on the ethnographer.

Life in Debt is a very interesting work which questions the effects of erasing the past, butalso cares to show readers the daily battles families take to achieve a dignified life within theneoliberal system.

Page 360 PoLAR: Vol. 36, No. 2

Mark WhitakerUniversity of Kentucky

In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri LankaSharika Thiranagama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)

In a war filled with tragedies, one of the least reported and most puzzling was the uglyexpulsion of roughly eighty thousand Muslims in October 1990 from Sri Lanka’s NorthernProvince and its most important city, Jaffna. This ‘Eviction’(106), as the author rightly termsit, was conducted by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (or LTTE), a ruthless separatistarmy then involved in a military struggle with a Sri Lankan state dominated by that country’smajority, Sinhalese, ethnic community. Relatively inexplicable on either political or militarygrounds alone, this displacement of Tamil speaking Muslims—a minority within the Tamilminority the LTTE claimed to represent and, thus, an “intimate refused other”(142)—involvedthe loss of all wealth and land, exile to displacement camps located tantalizingly close tothe province Muslims were now barred from and, most importantly, as Sharika Thiranagamacarefully explains, the amputation of a homeland (what in Tamil is called an ur) that was botha place and a distillation of interconnected practices and forms of personhood. Thiranagama’sexcellent ethnography is, at once, an attempted solution to the quandary of why this happenedand, more importantly, a scholarly and yet deeply personal meditation upon the complexconsequences for personhood and collective identity of the radical displacements war, as a“making and unmaking” form of “social life”(10, 6), too often engenders.

The cultural explication Thiranagama offers for the LTTE’s self-defeating eviction of theNorthern Muslims is part of a fascinating, wider argument she wants to make about whythe LTTE, in many ways, ended up so at odds with its own and its community’s interests.For Thiranagama, the LTTE, despite its claim to be the sole representative of the Tamilpeople, eventually developed at cross-purposes with the revolutionary nationalist inclinationsof the early 1980s generation that created it. That is, early 1980s nationalist revolutionaries,she argues, were really quite Janus-faced in their concerns: trying, at once, to critique theconservative, caste-centered paternalism (and patriarchy) of conventional Tamil social practiceseven as they sought to deflect a Sri Lankan state they felt was being increasingly bent bySinhalese nationalism toward the destruction of their community. The LTTE, by contrast,was focused with obsessive solemnity on nationalist separatism alone, and thus (with itsvalorization of martyrdom and intolerant, leader-centered totalitarianism) proclaimed itselfand its stated separatist task so exceptional (in the meta-social, sovereignty-constructing,citizenship and rights-denying sense implied by Giorgio Agamben’s theories) that the LTTE,eventually, placed itself completely outside the very community it aspired to protect and lead.For Thiranagama, then, the LTTE’s sanguinary militancy and its propensity for such self-defeating actions as assassinating critics, forcing the recruitment of underage soldiers, and, ofcourse, evicting Muslims from the Northern Province, were all alike products of its self-exileinto the “zone of exceptional life” (213) its peculiar form of nationalism made it make ofitself.

But, the LTTE aside, Thiranagama’s wider anthropological aim is to look at Sri Lanka’srecently concluded twenty-six year civil war as a form of social life with its own peculiarconsequences. She does this, with great delicacy, by peering through the existential windowsprovided by various people, Tamil and Muslim, who suffered through it—visiting them in their


kitchens, bed sites, and refugee huts both in Sri Lanka and, among the diaspora, in London andToronto. What she hears at these multiple sites, in addition to the brute suffering always bornby those forced to live within the bloody outrage of war, is surprisingly ambiguous. Socialand cultural destruction to be sure: of lives, physical places, marriage practices and formsof selfhood; but also, paradoxically, social and cultural construction: of new ways of being,of alternative and sometimes troubling forms of selfhood, and even, ironically, of an ethnicgroup—Northern Muslims themselves, of course—given sudden, collective identity as a kindof bitter-ironic gift by the very LTTE-inflicted trauma that was intended to forestall just thispossibility.

Thiranagama is able to describe all these odd twists and turns with convincing gravity becauseshe has her own existential window, or ‘glass darkly’, through which to view them; and this isone reason Thiranagama’s book glimmers with grim, sympathetic anger whenever it recountsthe cruel if creative adjustments people must make to the topsy-turvy calamities of war. Hermother, Rajani Thiranagama, a medical doctor, head of Jaffna University’s Department ofanatomy, and, most importantly, a human rights activist in the late 1980s during the confusingperiod when the LTTE was fighting India’s misnamed Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF),was shot dead in front of her own house in September 1989, most likely by the LTTE, forequal opportunity criticisms of human rights abuses by all sides in the conflict. Thiranagamais careful to avoid funneling the entirety of Sri Lanka’s plight through this singularly awfulpersonal fact, which resulted in her own exile to England. But she does allow it to illumineher title, an allusion to Pico Iyar’s famous essay, ‘In My Father’s House’, about his ownreorienting return to Ghana to attend his father’s funeral. She thus confirms why a centralconcern of her book is the problem of returning (or not being able to return), a problematiccommon to northern Muslims and unwilling exiles in general. Beyond this Thiranagama’sbackstory explains why the theoretical sophistication of her writing about the consequencesof war is shot through with a raw undercurrent of existential understanding; and perhapsalso why, when I had my undergraduates read her book, they responded to it with fierceappreciation.

This is not quite a perfect book. I think Thiranagama’s arguments about the LTTE, thoughbrilliant, are a little incomplete. First, Thiranagama claims that the LTTE was generally loathedand feared by Tamils in Sri Lanka whenever they were free to speak their minds. But I thinkthere is good evidence that local attitudes were more various, changeable, ambiguous, andsituationally nuanced than this. More importantly, perhaps because of her understandable de-cision to focus only on the Tamil side of the conflict, Thiranagama’s account suggests thatthe LTTE developed its “state of exception” (213) by itself rather than, as is more likely, inagonistic dialogue with a Sri Lankan state also tending in that direction. Certainly the disturb-ing human rights records of each suggest a shared disregard for the civic personhood of thosewithin their power but outside their definitions—a fact which, if true, may help to answerThiranagama’s summary question: “How is it that the end of the war has not brought aboutlarge-scale commitment to rethinking and finding political and constitutional resolution tothe uncertain status and transience of all minority life in Sri Lanka?” None of this, however,calls into question the importance of Thiranagama’s theoretical achievement here, or the elo-quence and sheer power of her ethnography. Everyone interested in Sri Lanka should read thisbook.


Tarini BediUniversity of Illinois at Chicago

Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gender Violencein Bangladesh

Elora Halim Chowdhury (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011)

An increasing number of scholarly monographs are urging critiques of development discourse.These more recent critiques are particularly focused on development discourse that emergesas governments in the global south recede. Development discourse in these contexts originatesin the complicity of NGOs, national elites, state bureaucracies, and international structuresof development aid from the West to the non-West. That much of this scholarship comesfrom anthropologists and sociologists working in South Asia is not surprising. This regionis precariously perched within a global moment of upheaval where market forces colludewith receding states and newly empowered elites. In South Asia, questions of gender andgender inequality are vital to discourses on development and to women’s empowerment.Elora Chowdhury’s incisive and well-researched book Transnationalism Reversed: WomenOrganizing Against Gender Violence in Bangladesh is a very valuable addition to this literature.

Bangladesh is an important place to illuminate the ways in which development discourseaddressing gender violence operates. As Chowdhury vividly illustrates, the NGO sector inBangladesh, buttressed by the neocolonial state, international capitalism, and the internationaldonor community plays a key role in the state’s obligations to prevent gender violence. Localmovements and their agents are transformed and (re-) constituted in the machinations betweenlocal, national, and transnational levels of mobilization and funding structures. The book tracesa local women’s advocacy group (Naripokkho) and many of its activists as they move fromradically opposing a particular form of gendered violence (acid attacks) to formalizing andincorporating into a transnationally mediated cause. Finally, Chowdhury analyzes the localfragmentation, dissent, and reinvention that she suggests are the inevitable consequences oftransnational feminist organizing within extant neoliberal development structures.

For anthropologists, what this book does so well is explore what happens to local movementsand their activists as their advocacy gets formalized and as activists and causes travel acrossnational boundaries. In the process of addressing “transnationalism reversed,” as Friedmanrecommends in her 1999 article in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Chowdhurypresents incisive critiques of all of the “neopatriarchal” (p. 142) relationships unleashed bytransnational feminist organizing as it moves between national, international, and local envi-ronments. This nuanced and unsentimental approach is this work’s greatest strength; in thisstory, there are ambiguous successes and failures all around. Activists are both co-conspiratorsand agents in shaping and reshaping movements and their own place within them.

Chapter 1 traces three broad phases of Naripokkho’s campaign against acid violence. The cam-paign began with a radical women and survivor-led mobilization in the mid-1990s. UNICEFintervened a few years later, due in no small part to international media attention and to thestage provided at the UN Conference on Women in Beijing to the “third-world horror.” Finallythe campaign consolidated into the UNICEF-mediated Acid Survivors Foundation (ASF), ledby an Englishman. Both the foundation and its leadership became closely implicated in thetransnational world of donors.


The second chapter lays out the local realities of acid violence in Bangladesh. Acid attacksinvolve throwing sulphuric acid on the face of a woman or young girl as an act of revengefor rejection, or other transgression of the patriarchal contract. These are culturally codedand familiar acts of violence against women (and often men) across South Asia. Chowdhurysuggests that this violence is rooted in the notion that women are physical objects on apatriarchal marriage market. This explains why many of the victims are young girls whoare desired or married women whose families were unable to contribute enough dowry to amarriage. When women fail to conform to patriarchal wills, disfiguring their bodies with acidassures that their value as an object is destroyed forever. Chowdhury points out that this is notthe only or most common form of gendered violence in this region. However, the attentionthat acid attacks have received by transnational agencies and the western media treats them asparticular spectacles of “third world horror” (p. 54) from which third world women must besaved. Unfortunately, this horror narrative obscures other inequalities and injustices that are leftunaddressed. For example, the author suggests that acid attacks are an important lens throughwhich to understand various failures of the state and the levels of discrimination faced bywomen, particularly rural women, because survivors of acid attacks have to access many levelsof structural and infrastructural services in order to heal physically, emotionally, and legally.Therefore, for Chowdhury, if a feminist project is to seriously tackle this form of violence,it has to be analyzed in terms of other structures of gender discrimination and market-driveninequalities particular to local women.

Chapter 3 follows the journey of two survivors, Bina and Jharna, shown to the West throughthe American television program 20/20 as they travel from Dhaka to Cincinnati for surgeryand treatment. Bina is one of Naripokkho’s key voices in the acid violence campaign. Inthis chapter readers are introduced to the ways in which she (re)constitutes herself throughher mediated presence in the Western media, and through her negotiations with a foreigncountry. Chowdhury frames this chapter through the broader narrative of human rights andtransnational feminist narrative analysis to illuminate how the young women are implicatedin various conflicting narratives as they ostensibly further the aims of the anti-acid campaign.They also constitute new selves through the various stages of their participation. Bina disruptsthe victim narrative at several moments during her involvement with the campaign. Her finaldisruption comes when she refuses to return to Bangladesh, opposing all agreements in placebetween the various agencies that sent her to the United States. This act of errant behaviormarks the beginning of the dissolution of the local movement in Bangladesh. The bitterirony of transnational feminist organizing lies right here for Chowdhury—that everythingbegins to fall apart when Bina asserts an agency incommensurable with dominant developmentnarratives.

Chowdhury discusses shifts in ideas of the new woman in Bangladesh in chapter 4. She exploreshow women and particularly third-world women get constructed as a category through NGOand development initiatives. The chapter is also an incisive critique of the ways in which NGO-led development creates new forms of local dependencies between women of different classes.In an interesting engagement with anthropological perspectives on visual culture, the chapterdiscusses how locally produced media (in this case film) is just as complicit as the Westernmedia in inadvertently furthering “a neoliberal script of development and women’s empower-ment” (p. 131). As a well-researched and nuanced analysis should do, Chowdhury’s book letsno one off the hook—but instead holds the mirror up to all involved in the transnational feministproject.


Chapter 5 broadens the debate on transnational feminist praxis to discuss the ways in which thelocal politics of religion and transnational discourses on Muslim women intersect with localwomen’s organizing in Bangladesh.

The book concludes with a call to reorient transnational feminist praxis to attend to the newregimes of repression that they actualize. Chowdhury argues that feminist organizing mustbe accountable to the realities of women’s struggles rather than fitting them into “normativeregisters of patriarchy and imperialism” (p. 189).

Transnationalism Reversed would particularly interest anthropologists who work on the an-thropology of development, globalization, global feminism, and political anthropology. Thisbook might also be provocative for students of ethnographic method, given that Chowdhuryacknowledges her multiple and fluctuating positions as an ethnographer and offers a multi-sitedethnography. In parts, the writing does get a little repetitive; but this is a minor quibble andtakes nothing away from the rich ethnography and the sophisticated challenges to theory andpraxis that Chowdhury provokes.

Diana BocarejoEscuela de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad del Rosario

Between the Guerrillas and the State: The Cocalero Movement,Citizenship and Identity on the Colombian Amazon

Marıa Clemencia Ramırez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)

Between the Guerrillas and the State narrates the 1996 cocalero uprising in Putumayo, Colom-bia presenting it “as a diagnostic event that reveals ongoing contests, conflicts and competitionsand the efforts to prevent, suppress, or repress them” (p. 2). This uprising emerged when Colom-bia was rapidly becoming the number one producer of unprocessed coca leaf in the world andthe social movement was consolidated precisely by small campesinos growing coca in sociallymarginalized areas of the Colombian Amazon. The movement not only re-instantiated the de-mands of previous civic strikes seeking the improvement of state investment in infrastructure,health care, housing, or education, but it also openly contested the criminalization of smallcoca growers, advocating for their recognition and their rights as Colombian citizens.

The book, however, is about more than just the movement itself. The richness of the text stemsfrom the author’s attempts to show the paradoxes of “inclusion and exclusion, legality andillegality, order and disorder, ruled and unruled” (p. 7) experienced by citizens caught betweenthe guerrillas and the state. In fact, in resonance with Anna Tsing’s work, Ramırez captureshow contradictory discourses overlap most clearly in the margins. She shows the anxieties ofcampesinos who are stigmatized as coca growers, but who only have access to national andinternational institutions through this very same form of identification.

Drawing on the richness of the case analyzed, Ramırez engages with different bodies of aca-demic literature. She shares, both analytically and I would say emotionally, with the literaturein anthropology and other social sciences that narrates how marginality is experienced, con-fronted, bent, and reignited. She also engages with the theorization of social movements,clearly departing and showing an important critique of the models whose main purpose is totypify old and new social movements or to treat social movements as the outcomes of citizens’


careful and rational calculations. The book’s significant contribution lies in the historical andethnographic analysis of the possibilities–and impossibilities– of making one’s livelihood andlife possible at the intersection of violence, local state formation, neoliberalism, and the waron drugs.

The author’s portrayal of the “dynamic state of affairs of campesinos” (p. ix) in the area infusesevery passage of the book. It is this dynamism which ultimately provides the conditions fortheir actions, expectations, and hopes for the social movement. Consequently, the author states:“throughout this ethnography of the 1996 cocalero movement I have sought to emphasize theagency of its subjects” (p. 13). This central theme sets the stage for interesting discussionsregarding agency both within discussions of social movements and beyond. Ramırez explainsthat “the cocalero movement challenged and contested campesino subjection to both the stateand the guerrillas” (p. 13). This active contestation was at the center of what the author shapesas a cocalero’s agency. This leads me to ask: what is the extent of this agency and what mayits limits be? Would it be possible to trace different and changing forms of agency throughoutthe mobilization? Furthermore, how can we frame cocaleros’ agency before and after the 1996mobilization?

The answer to these questions depends, in part, on the close relationship the author tracesbetween agency and forms of collective identification and action. As such, the contestationof identitary classifications and forms of political subjectivity vis-a-vis the state, other in-ternational institutions, and the guerrillas becomes a way of contesting and reshaping theirlegibility in the highly violent intersection of local sovereignties. An important insight forunderstanding how agency is deployed in this context arises from the distinction that smallcoca growers make between themselves and large plantation owners and drug traffickers andthe way that cocaleros object to being called agents of the state or agents or the FARC. I wouldsay, borrowing the idea from Stuart Hall, that the cocalero movement in the Putumayo was a“struggle over the access to the very means of signification”. That is, it was “the differencebetween those accredited witnesses and spokesmen who had the privileged access, as of right,to the world of public discourse . . . as contrasted with those who had to struggle to gainaccess to the world of public discourse at all; whose ‘definitions’ were always more partial,fragmentary and delegitimated; and who, when they did gain access, had to perform with theestablished terms of the problematic in play” (Hall, 1982:77).

Though beyond the scope of the book, it would be interesting to know how these re-conceptualizations of identity are fed, shaped, and reshaped in many other instances andcontexts beyond the uprising of 1996. I am sure in the near future Ramırez’s continued workin the area may follow such old and new reconfigurations. For example, does the constructionof a cocalero identity extend to other scenarios or areas of daily or political life? That is, iscocalero as a distinctive identity category used beyond the social movement? Different authorswho have theorized the study of identity, such as Peter Wade, have used the concept of “sit-uational identity” to explain the manner in which, depending on the contexts of enunciation,people shape and also use different forms of identification. Thus, could we define cocalero as asituational political subjectivity only present within the 1996 negotiations? Can scholars makesense of the cocaleros’ agency in Putumayo beyond an opposition to the political ideas of actorssuch as the state, the guerrillas, USAID, PLANTE, etc.? Ramırez is in fact showing readersa more complex image, one in which, in certain circumstances, cocaleros find their rhetoricaligned with that of the state. Ramırez explains, for example, how the political negotiationsof 1996 were only saved when human rights were promoted “to the top of the agenda” (p.156). The language of human rights, development, and progress is used by many actors in the


region, even if the terms’ meanings and their translations in specific programs of interventionare actually disputed.

After reading Ramırez’s book, readers can easily agree with the author’s concluding remarks,where she writes: “The social and economic conditions associated with the armed conflictand drug trafficking have evolved, but there has been no structural change. The underlyingsocial dynamics and processes examined in this book that revolve around the growing ofcoca remain the same” (p. 238). However, how can scholars understand the link that theauthor makes between those structural realities and the different forms of agency at play?Have those structures changed at all, even if they have left the inequalities in place? Howdoes the author’s “emphasis on agency” (p. 13) actually re-signify or not such “structures”?This is of crucial concern, especially since the author’s statement of the problem argues that,citing Veena Das, the cocalero uprising was also a critical event in reference to consequences:“new models of action came into being, which redefined traditional categories . . . equallynew forms were acquired by a variety of political actors” (p. 3). Therefore, how long did“these new models of action” last after the uprising? Was the cocaleros’ possibility of beingaddressed as interlocutors and participants of Putumayo’s future completely lost under Presi-dent Uribe’s democratic security, with the intensification of military attacks against guerrillasand of the aerial fumigation in the area? If the repeated demands of campesinos, who dependon small coca crops for their subsistence, continues to be ignored by the state, can we saythat the agency addressed by the author has been completely lost? Was it something entirelytemporary?

This book talks to a wide audience of readers interested in understanding the complexitiesof marginality, social movements, the war on drugs, guerrillas’ political practices, local stateformation, and the dynamics of their articulations in particular times and places. In addition toall the interesting discussions that build upon these subjects, I want to highlight the importanceof this book given the current debates on the urgency of rethinking drug policy in Colombia andworldwide. This book was written years ago, but its English version comes at a crucial momentin the international debate over the war on drugs. Various Latin American governments, as wellas citizens all over the globe, are actively questioning the effectiveness of the war on drugs andmost importantly are showing with despair its negative social and political consequences. Eventhough the debate may be moving in the direction of seriously addressing drug consumption,public health, and alternatives in regulation, the issue of producing countries is far fromconcluded. In fact, just to mention a few issues, what are the effects of aerial fumigation and ofdevelopment projects directed to areas of coca production? Are those areas less marginalizedthan they used to be before the war on drugs? Has the state been able to reclaim its presencein those areas and consolidate a new local democratic regime? Are campesinos still attackedboth by guerrillas or other non-state forces such as paramilitaries and by the state? As MarıaClemencia Ramırez shows, even in very volatile contexts the “dynamic state of affairs” inPutumayo does not seem to bring about drastic change in its structural conditions of marginality.The author shows how even in the midst of active civic uprisings and political engagements,the complex configurations between guerrilla, state, drug trafficking, and the war on drugsboth inescapably fuel and illuminate the tremendous rigidity of social inequalities. In sum,for the careful historic and ethnographic account as well as the broad discussions this bookintegrates, this book is a very fine contribution to understanding the complex articulations ofactors and practices that configure the contours of marginality, but also the possibilities forpolitical action in areas such as the Putumayo.


Gabrielle LynchUniversity of Warwick

Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a NeoliberalWorld

Dorothy Hodgson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011)

In this excellent book, Hodgson examines how and why, in the late twentieth and earlytwenty first centuries, Maasai activists in Tanzania positioned and then repositioned them-selves as indigenous and then as pastoralists in their struggles for representation, recognition,resources, and rights. More specifically, Hodgson analyzes how these activists moved frombasing their “political claims on discourses of indigenity to discourses of livelihoods; fromengaging in international advocacy to national advocacy; and from calling themselves NGOs[nongovernmental organizations] and CBOs [community-based organizations] to civil societyorganizations (CSOs)” (xi). The result is a rich historical ethnography of how civil societyworks at the local level and of how ethnic identities are negotiated and used in postcolonial andneoliberal contexts. Particularly valuable is Hodgson’s persuasive exposition of how a globalindigenous people’s movement initially led Maasai activists to become indigenous only for thecontinued relevance of the nation-state to later encourage them to recast their claims on thebasis of pastoralist livelihoods.

The book begins with an analysis of the proliferation of Maasai organizations and consciousengagement of Maasai activists in a transnational indigenous people’s movement. Hodgsonshows how this engagement brought significant financial benefits, but also fostered division andtensions on the basis of best approach, generation, gender, and ethnic and sectional identities,and also fostered more specific problems linked to a reliance on donor funding, which includedlocal competition for funds. However, when the Tanzanian state refused to accept that Maasai“were discriminated against because of their cultural distinctiveness, mode of production, andpolitical-economic marginalization within the state,” activists shifted their advocacy effortsfrom the international to national arena, reframed their political struggles from a languageof “indigenous rights” to “pastoralist livelihoods,” and called themselves CSOs (p. 157).This pragmatic move brought moderate successes and the Tanzanian government has provedmore willing to listen to pastoralist than indigenous claims. However, according to Hodgson,government officials still fail to take Maasai concerns seriously, their marginalization instead“exacerbated by the government’s push, under international pressure, to “reform” its landpolicies, improve livestock production for national gains, and spread its increasingly thinresources among increasingly destitute citizens” (p. 180).

In terms of particular additions to the literature, I found Hodgson’s elaboration of the conceptof positionings particularly useful. I hope that it will help move debate about ethnic identitiesin contemporary sub-Saharan Africa (in particular) away from a rather tired debate about socialconstructivism versus instrumentalism. Instead, as Hodgson illustrates, a focus on positioningsleads to a discussion about how and why people seek to identify or position themselves in aparticular way given understandings of their own past, present, and future; political, cultural,and socio-economic contexts; and relationships with other actors at the local, national, andtransnational or global levels. On such lines, one thing that struck me was the clear similaritiesand differences between the Tanzanian and Kenyan contexts (the latter being something Iknow much more about). In short, while many activists in Kenya also came to positionthemselves as indigenous in the late twentieth century, most have not repositioned themselves


as pastoralists. One potential reason for the lack of a similar, or at least such notable shift,is the oft-cited difference in the post-colonial trajectories of these two countries and relativepolitical importance of ethnic identities and contrasting approaches to nation-building. If thisis true, then this geographic difference actually reinforces Hodgson’s central argument for the“mediating role of the state in shaping political positionings and possibilities for civil societyto engage with transnational advocacy networks and movements” (p. 4).

In terms of methodology, the analysis clearly benefits from Hodgson’s long-running engage-ment with and assessment of Maasai activism. The product is an organic analysis where theorieshave been used to explain local contexts and observed changes rather than case studies beingemployed to test theory, and to a methodology that Hodgson terms “nodal ethnography” (p.18). Initially, Hodgson focused on the “major nodes”—the key players and the key sites—andthen traced “the links—of funding, ideas, people, affiliations, and so forth—of these majornodes . . . with more “minor nodes”: the other groups, institutions, people, places, and so forth”(pp. 18, 20). One outcome is the rich detail that comes from decades of firsthand experiences,although this has also contributed to middle chapters that are rather empirically heavy with themore theoretical analysis concentrated at the top and tail of the book.

Finally, and on a more critical note, while Hodgson understandably does not want to getembroiled in the issue of authenticity and questions of whether the Maasai are an indigenouspeople or not, there is an often implicit tendency to accept that the poverty and marginalizationof the Tanzanian Maasai stems, at least in part, from their pastoralist identity and lifestyle:their situation thus becoming “part of a global pattern” (p. 28) shared by other indigenouspeoples. In turn, she is insufficiently clear on the extent to which Tanzania Maasai have beenmarginalized relative to their compatriots, the reasons for such relative marginalization, andwhether Maasai activists have tackled the right problems. Since, if their marginalization is dueto broader structural inequalities of wealth and power, they have surely been doomed to fail.This weakness is likely a result of Hodgson’s proximity to the issues at hand, which—whileone of the great things about this book—has perhaps led her (as she herself notes as a commonproblem of such anthropological endeavors) to be “wary of critiquing, however constructively,the ideas, practices, and agendas of these movements for fear of undermining their politicalsupport and agendas” (p. 14).

Lars BuurDanish Institute for International Studies

Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of TransitionCatherine M. Cole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009)

This is an important book—a bit wordy, but generally very well written—on the South AfricanTruth and Reconciliation Commission (hereafter the commission) and the public stages ofperformance that molded and potentially could still mold people’s perception of truth andreconciliation in South Africa and elsewhere. It focuses on some of the public dimensions ofthe commission’s work, namely the public hearings (research conducted primarily until 1998when the human rights violation part of the commission ceased to work in contrast to theamnesty part), the television programs that documented some of the commission’s work, andseveral pieces of theatre inspired by it.


Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission cuts across several of the genres so far employedto address the impacts and legacies of the work of the commission, including the plethora ofpersonal accounts ranging from chairperson Desmond Tutu’s memoir and those of commis-sioners, committee members and department heads to those of ordinary staff members. Thebook stands apart from the mostly academic literature that uses the testimonies from the publichearings to analyze narratives, silences and agency or as a springboard for further analysis ofpatterns of violence, human rights violation, gender bias, prospects for reconciliation and soforth. It also stands apart from the broad spectrum of work informed by different scientific tra-ditions and legal positivism that has characterized the search for the foundation of transitionaljustice, reconciliation, and rights-based approaches.

The five well-crafted chapters present instances of how the public or the nation experiencedor witnessed the public proceedings of the commission either directly or mediated throughthe news media or art. Cole manages—and this is no small feat—in the first two chaptersto position the performance perspective. She also recasts the related fields of transitionaljustice and political trials to reveal new dimensions of the constitutive fields of specific trialsin South Africa and transitional justice. Witnessing and Interpreting Testimony, the book’sthird chapter, zooms in on the important work done by interpreters. They relayed in realtime the commission’s proceedings in multiple languages at great speed and under enormouspressure to be formally accurate. Instead of the supposedly simple one-to-one positivist relayingof language, Cole shows how the multilingual stage of the commission refined, developed,sharpened, and changed the nature of the testimonies as body language and the culturaldimensions of words and phrases became intertwined with the uttering and rendering ofdifferent languages.

The fourth chapter, Eyes and Ears of the Nation, hones in on a relatively unexplored featureof the public life and afterlife of the commission—the mediatized performances of live TVbroadcasts and other television coverage, particularly the SABC’s investigative TRC SpecialReport series. The chapter is a treat and pushes the boundaries for understanding the impactand legacies of the commission. This is not solely because few have read or will read theFinal Report compared to the large number who experienced the commission’s more publicperformances. It is also because of the chapter’s capacity to illustrate the polyvalence and mul-tiplicity of layers achieved by the public coverage of the commission by asking new questionsrelated to witnessing, viewing, and producing truth and its repercussions for reconciliation orrepair. In Dragons in the Living Room, the book’s fifth chapter, Cole most explicitly explainsher performance perspective and understanding of the work of the commission as an ongoingprocess instead of a discrete event. She foregrounds the performative dimensions of retelling,narrative and memories of lived history in analyzing Philip Miller’s production Rewind: ACantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony celebrating the tenth anniversary of the commission.

Cole’s book draws explicitly on a variety of methodologies including theatre, history, po-litical philosophy and culturally specific perspectives, and perhaps less explicitly on post-structuralism theory related to performativity, to develop and sharpen the analysis. Theoreti-cally, the book has several errands that are explored in greater detail in the specific chapters. Bystaying away from the stance of post-structuralism, Cole seems to be actively trying to avoidbeing placed in the rather limited post-structuralist and post-colonial camps of the culturaland political science genres in contrast to the broader fields of legal, transitional and culturalstudies. However, perhaps the focus on performance, media and art does anyway position thebook in the post-structuralism camp for quite a few of the multiple constituencies Cole wantsto address.


This brings me to my final comments on this excellent and intriguing book. The afterwordbrings into play a range of more inclined ethnographic, anthropological and sociologicalstudies and perspectives on the commission. Cole discusses authors who have analyzedthe everyday work of the staff of the commission in contrast to the genre’s usual focus oncelebrities like Tutu, and the detailed theoretical and methodological implications of thevarious truth and reconciliation techniques and traditions at work in the commission, as wellas the human rights discursive work of the commission. Cole may not have wanted to overdothe referencing in order to make the book unnecessarily heavy to read, while simultaneouslywanting to add more perspectives. Yet I wonder if the ethnographic and anthropologicalauthorships included as an afterthought would have changed her perspective and celebrationof contested concepts like Ubuntu (reified notion of people’s allegiances and relations witheach other) and encouraged her to show a greater attentiveness to the a priori structuring ofthe performance or performativity of the Commission.

Jeremy M. CampbellRoger Williams University

Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican ForestsAndrew S. Mathews (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011)

Much ethnography since the mid-1980s has been dedicated to the careful study of howknowledge-making necessarily entails power struggles in everyday encounters: the powerto name, to enunciate official discourses, and to privilege or occlude phenomena as thesites of knowledge. This important work has relied on the assumption that knowinginstitutions—organizations such as states or regimes of scientific authority—go about theirwork with a determined confidence, and that the power of these institutions corresponds totheir ability to construct the grids of intelligibility through which the subjects of knowledgewill come to know themselves. While Andrew Mathews’ Instituting Nature: Authority,Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests contributes to this rich line of research, he turns thebaseline assumptions of ethnographies of power and knowledge on their heads. At the heartof this compelling account of the arrival of forestry science in Mexico and its subsequenttransformation into community forestry, Mathews is exploring the conceit that perhaps it isignorance, rather than knowledge, that is the most important feature in how bureaucracieswork and how authoritative discourses come to travel.

Based on careful oral histories, archival research, and accompanying officials andlocals as they move through Oaxaca’s forests, Mathews shows how various commu-nities are induced to “institute nature” for their own motives. The text proceeds innine chapters, though it can be more usefully thought of as having three sections.In the first section, Mathews outlines his principal argument—that collusion and complicitybetween experts and their publics is crucial to how state authority becomes effective. Mathewscontends that moments of confusion, dissimulation, and official reversals have markedthe construction of nature/culture binaries within official Mexican forestry discourse andpractice, and that would-be subjects of rule have actively undermined, remade, or evadedthese binaries. Mathews lays out the theoretical foundations of his work, which includes nodsto science studies scholars Sheila Jasanoff, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour, and chartsa fresh approach to James Scott’s (and by extension Foucault’s) framing of state power asvision. Mathews insists that state’s ability to see is itself the result of socially-situated dramas,


encounters between officials, communities, and ecosystems that are messy and indeterminate.These encounters have to be produced as seemingly transparent ligatures of power/knowledgeafter the fact. Between forest communities and the official reports that pin them as “known” isa rich terrain of trial-and-error, miscommunication, and willful ignorance that Mathews arguesis the halting and fallible site for the construction of state power and popular accession to rule.

Mathews next explores the environmental and political history of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca,where he tracks the arrival of forestry practice and knowledge in the early twentieth century.Writing from interviews and archives, Mathews convincingly portrays Oaxacan oak and pineforests as complex environments that had been shaped by indigenous economies, war, and thepolitics of patronage through the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, forestry sciencearrived in the region with an explicitly modernist orientation toward rationally managingMexico’s natural resources and alleviating “rural ignorance” (p. 41). On the heels of the revo-lution, forestry science and bureaucracy took aim at the ejido system and swidden agriculture.Arbor Day celebrations were spectacles which wedded environmental values with citizenshipideals. As readers learn in Mathews’ thorough history, however, the institution of forestry didnot unfurl evenly over the Oaxacan landscape: “the state was very good at communicatingwhat it wanted people to do even as it was very rarely able to make them actually obeyregulations” (p. 102). From 1920 through the late 1950s, indigenous Oaxaquenos learned thescript of forestry regulations and began to adjust their practices to fit with the emerging regimeof power/knowledge. While firewood harvesters and charcoal producers learned approvedtechniques to continue exploiting the forest, they also learned how to evade surveillance and toinfluence the exercise of rule. In the latter half of the 20th century, the focus of forestry in SierraJuarez shifted toward large-scale industrial logging. Though state- and corporate-sponsoredideologies of environmental management circulated widely in the region, Mathews contendsthat these were never imposed on indigenous communities. To the contrary, Mathews explainsthat the rise of community forestry in Oaxaca—where it is a model of rationality, profitability,and local sovereignty—is due to “creative reworking(s) of official discourse and history . . . intoan environmental history that justifies community ownership of the forest” (p. 140).

So how did this work? In the third section—by far the most ethnographically rich and usefulto scholars interested in the methodological challenges of studying bureaucracies—Mathewsdetails how documents and official encounters provide the theatre for effective power. In thefinal chapters, we learn how local forestry officials are under pressure to report only certainkinds of knowledge to Mexico City; how indigenous participation in forestry bureaucracygets enmeshed in the community cargo system; and how paperworkers and loggers “skillfullytranslate foresters’ theories into local practice” (p. 229). The community’s success in layingclaim to forestry resources emerges as a result of local foresters’ skillful participation in thedramas of public knowledge and authority. To a certain extent, the comuneros of Sierra Juarezlearn to become petty bureaucrats by shuffling papers and mastering the art of dissimulation,but as Mathews reminds us “public assent to forestry was not produced by the imposition of astate project . . . but by the ability of a well-organized and powerful community to collaboratein making knowledge that would inhabit national timber production statistics and officialreports” (p. 232).

Instituting Nature may prove challenging to undergraduates, but the weaving of detailedethnographic description into sophisticated arguments can serve as a model for advancedseminars in science studies and the anthropology of the state. By taking a novel approach tostate power, Mathews is clearly hoping to reach an audience beyond scholars of Mexico andLatin America, though the book is also replete with careful research and thoughtful passagesthat will delight regional specialists as well.


Emma CreweSOAS, University of London

Toward an Anthropology of Government: Democratic Transformationsand Nation Building in Wales

William R. Schumann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

William Schumann paints a detailed picture of political transformations in Wales based onresearch carried out in 2003, 2005, and 2007. He makes sure that the reader does not getlost in the detail. In his historical tour of the politics of Wales he weaves together variousthreads—Welsh and UK political parties; class, socialism and neo-liberalism; nationalism andunionism—with elegance. Throughout, he keeps returning to the most momentous scene-setting event: UK devolution. During this devolution, assemblies were established in Scotland,Northern Ireland, and Wales in 1999 by the Labour administration under Tony Blair.

The Welsh National Assembly was created to enable a decentralized institution to addressthe socio-economic needs of Wales more effectively. But the intention was also to transformparliamentary culture of UK democracy; in the words of the White Paper on devolution, itwould be inclusive, transparent, and modern. In contrast to Westminster, working patternswould be more family-friendly, procedures more informal, the semi-circular seating wouldencourage consensus rather than contest, the language more inclusive (for example, bilingual),and information technologies more widely used. The powers in the Welsh Assembly were,however, weaker than those of the Scottish parliament. Assembly Members (AMs) could onlypass ‘secondary legislation’ passed on from London (or from Brussels via London) and theycould not raise taxes or set their own budgets. At the first elections near-equal numbers offemale and male MPs were elected—an extremely unusual event for any parliament—butagainst all this hope Schumann points to persistent challenges: socio-economic problems, lackof public interest and the weakness of the Assembly within the wider political systems of theUK and Europe.

The fine-grained ethnographical detail was partly possible because Schumann worked as anintern for the Liberal Democrats. It means he describes the formal organization, most obviouslyby political party, but also informal codes of behavior. For example, party loyalty is importantbut fraternization across political parties is encouraged: political staffers from different partiesmeet socially partly to lay the social groundwork for asking favors and passing on information.Within parties the informal communication extends beyond Wales in ways that usually gounseen. Schumann tells a story about how a Welsh special adviser, often conduits of informationbehind the scenes, texted an MP in Westminster to ask a question and within minutes the MPstood up in the House of Commons to ask for clarification on the government’s intentionsto revise decision-making powers in Wales. Despite the rhetoric and mechanisms of openand transparent government, ‘deal-making’ between parties continues away from the camerasbecause some secrecy is perceived to be necessary for healthy democracy. The traditionalapproaches to the study of parliament, relying heavily on structured surveys as they do, couldnot have uncovered these fascinating partially hidden processes.

Schumann explores the various layers of legitimation and representation that play out in theNational Assembly and in the best spirit of anthropological research on politics, he doesso with intense attention to context, empirical detail, and drama. First, preparing policy


documents and deliberating views in parliament are tools for the Assembly’s legitimation; the‘hierarchical and technocratic structure of these practices, after all, is in the political DNA ofUK democracy.’ Secondly, he tells of a process traveling in the opposite direction in the senseof being distinctively Welsh and an example of resistance—that is, legitimizing the use ofWelsh in UK governance by making the Assembly bilingual in English and Welsh. SpeakingWelsh in the Assembly has become significant in claims to both having a Welsh identity andrepresenting national interests. Thirdly, the semiotic struggles in the Assembly allow AMs todifferentiate themselves from each other, when, for example, Ministers displace criticism ofthe government to a different time, place, or remit. Schumann agrees with Habermas’s thesisthat parliament is important in giving politicans the means to appear to be representing publicinterests through rationalized communication. But in contrast to Habermas, he illustrates how,in Wales, contest rather than consensus is the result.

He then moves beyond Wales. The relationship between the UK parliament and WelshAssembly—the dominance of the former and limited powers of the latter—is painted onthe canvas of the Iraq war. He contrasts the vigorous public opposition to this war in Wales (butalso in other parts of the UK) relative to voter apathy in the 2003 Welsh elections which sawa turnout of only 38%. Finally we are taken to the even broader frame of decision-making inWales within the context of UK and Europe through the example of GMO. Even more tellingthan the substance of the policy debate was what was revealed about Welsh political nation-hood. The demands that GMOs should be banned by Wales, made by some AMs and civilsociety groups and denied by the government, exposed the weakness of the Welsh NationalAssembly, and therefore democracy in Wales, in relation to UK and Europe. The reproductionof political power wins out over the representation of the interests of the public in Wales, heargues, and he ends the book with an argument in favor of increasing the powers of the NationalAssembly along the lines of the Scottish Parliament.

Schumann has made an invaluable contribution to the debate between anthropologists on gov-ernment and political transformations in the UK and Europe. As he says, some anthropologistsmay argue for a different emphasis at certain points. I would have welcomed more on howideas of legitimacy and representation were culturally constructed and how they related tosocio-political hierarchies within the Assembly and wider society. The extraordinarily unusualnear-equal numbers of female and male AMs is mentioned in chapter 2, but does not emergeagain in the book. It would be fascinating to know whether this gender parity has made anydifference to the rhetoric or practice of representation of the interests of Welsh men and women.While Schumann offers a tantalizing glimpse into self-reflexivity when discussing being anAmerican in the face of protest against the Iraq (which he joined), his book raises interestingquestions about the outsider/insider status of anthropologists. Does Schumann see the NationalAssembly with particular clarity as someone who is neither Welsh nor English and is it lesscontentious for him to conclude that the legislature in Wales deserves more power? He alsoargues that anthropologists should engage in debate with researchers of politics in other dis-ciplines, a suggestion I heartily agree with. At a moment when some scholars of parliamentshow signs of questioning both rational choice theory and institutionalism, this book opensup all kinds of possibilities. Schumann’s book illustrates how an examination of politics hasto embrace the importance of culture, power, ideas, and communication to get to the heart ofgovernance.


Gemma JohnUniversity of Manchester

Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in IndiaAkhil Gupta (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)

Red Tape is a brave attempt to answer a harrowing question: ‘Why has a state whose proclaimedmotive is to foster development failed to help the large number of people who still live in direpoverty?’ (p. 3). The number of people lost in India due to malnutrition and morbidity translatesto over 2 million annual deaths, a figure that overshadows those killed by natural disastersglobally (p. 5).

Gupta argues one should not view the deaths of thousands of poor as evidence of the state’sneglect. Rather, their deaths should be seen as evidence of ‘structural violence’ (p.19) againstthe poor at the hand of the state; in other words, the state has actively attempted to kill them.Following Agamben, he considers the death of the poor as a form of ‘thanapolitics’ (p. 6).The state constitutes the poor as not worth saving. Yet the poor continue to vote for a statethat appears to do nothing to save them. Moreover, their input is necessary for the state to beperceived as open and democratic. The poor are killed, Gupta argues, despite their centralityto democratic politics and state legitimacy.

In an attempt to answer the question he poses—why has the state failed to help a large numberof poor people—he claims the state and the poor are mutually constituted. Gupta pointsout everyday state practices serve to produce both the state and the poor and legitimize thestate’s actions against them. Employing Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, he argues so-calledstatistical objects like the birthrate and the rate of mortality and morbidity, come into a calculusof planning and control, which enables the population to become a target of intervention,regulation, and deviance (p. 15). However, Gupta argues that Foucault’s theory of biopoliticsdoes not explain why the state’s treatment of the poor is so arbitrary. Gupta dwells on thetension and conflict between different arms of the state. The state’s apparent disorganization,or arbitrary action, Gupta argues is indicative of its indifference—that is, its indifference to‘arbitrary outcomes’ (p. 24) that for the poor are a matter of life or death.

Having conducted fieldwork for one year on state antipoverty programmes in the Mandisubdistrict of Utter Pradesh, Gupta pays close attention to the everyday practices of statebureaucracies such as corruption and inscription through which both the state and the poor areconstituted.

Stories of state corruption became a feature of the everyday lives of poor people, Guptaargues, such that the state comes into being through citizens’ narratives of corruption. Thosewho cannot afford to bribe state bureaucrats are marginalized as boundaries are drawn betweenthose who can and cannot pay. The actions of state bureaucrats, their decisions and motivations,their arbitrary treatment of the poor, powerfully create both the state and the poor as particularkinds of entities. Yet corruption, Gupta argues, is not to be taken at face value. Notions ofcorruption provide insight into what its citizens anticipate the state should be/do, which inturn, gives insight into how the state becomes constituted in their eyes. In the context of theantipoverty programmes Gupta describes, citizenship has been crafted as being about inclusion.To be excluded indicates the state’s failure to deliver on its own promise.


Gupta’s analysis of inscription is by far the most intriguing as he dwells on the importanceof the file. It is his interest in the file that prompts the title of his book. He notes: ‘The fileis a compilation of papers of different sizes and qualities [ . . . ] Across the width of the filegoes a red tape that keeps anything from falling out’ (p. 145). Yet, in a surprising twist, Guptaputs forward a case for the fragility of the written word. In the context of complaints made bycitizens about the state, Gupta highlights the codependency of oral and written statements. Theauthenticity of a written document is sometimes in question since written documents are oftenaltered or fabricated: ‘The reliability of the document depends primarily on a knowledge ofthe character of the writer’ (p. 207). In this sense, oral accounts serve to bolster the credibilityof written statements. Gupta’s account of the relationship between written documents andoral accounts, and also statistics and narrative, makes a significant contribution to existinganthropological analysis of the construction of knowledge in bureaucratic settings.

Rather than take the existence of the unified state for granted, Red Tape takes the articulationof such a state as a social fact that requires anthropological and sociological analysis (p. 57).He describes the state not as bounded, whole, cohesive, but as fragmented and dispersed. It iscontinually being generated and regenerated through the actions of state bureaucrats as wellas citizens’ oral narratives. The state is disaggregated, Gupta argues, and it is also imbricatedin international and transnational development networks, which means that it has becomedispersed across these networks. In light of its fragmentation and dispersal, Gupta’s Red Tapeis a radical attempt to extend Foucault’s theory of governmentality. He argues that Foucaultestablished his theory of governmentality on the notion of the nation-state. Gupta attempts toextend the boundaries of the state beyond the nation.

In answer to his own question—why has the state failed to help a large number of poorpeople—I would have liked Gupta to put this question directly to state bureaucrats and thepoor. Do they recognize this as a failure of the state? Do they have their own answers or eventheir own version of this question? Drawing on the explanations given by state bureaucratsand the poor in relation to their own activities would enable Gupta to more convincingly showthat the theoretical methodology he employs is aligned with people’s own understanding ofthemselves rather than a part and product of scholarly discourse. I felt both Gupta’s questionsand answers are heavily guided by existing theory, and as a reader, I was left unsure of whetherthey actually articulated the preoccupations of state bureaucrats and the poor themselves. What(different) conclusions would Gupta reach if he pursued his own subjects’ lines of inquiry?

Julie McBrienUniversity of Amsterdam

Secularism, Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a VolgaRepublic

Sonja Luehrmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011)

For legal and political anthropologists, religious revivals, and their links to publicspheres and modern nation-states, has been of great interest for the last two decades.However, when the term ‘revival’ is used to talk about the present it intimatessomething about the past, an understanding of which is all too often assumed rather thaninvestigated. Scholars of the former socialist world, for example, know a great deal about the


early attacks on religion in the Soviet Union, the most violent of perhaps any secular(izing)nation-state. The contours of secularism in the late Soviet period—the most immediate ref-erent for those living in the post-Soviet era—remains, however, rather unexplored. In herexamination of the multi-religious field of Marij El, a republic in Russia’s Volga region, SonjaLuehrmann has made an important step toward rectifying this. She combines ethnography withhistorical investigation and asks an important question: what can a study of religion revealabout secularism? Her answers provide rich insights into the lived and taught Soviet atheismof the 1960s and 70s.

Luehrmann explores the ways in which Soviet society might be understood as secu-lar. Relying on Charles Taylor’s account of Western secularism, she asserts that, muchlike the liberal project, socialist secularism can be defined by its “exclusive humanism”(p. 7). She takes this as her point of departure and describes the ways in which so-calledcultural workers attempted to bring about a society constructed solely on the basis of, and onlywith reference to, human agents.

She focuses her attention on those involved most intimately with the Soviet secularizingproject—the methodicians—and their didactic endeavors. Early on in her fieldwork she no-ticed striking similarities between these former soviet cultural workers and contemporaryreligious leaders and teachers, especially regarding the methodology that inspired and drovetheir instructional endeavors. Perplexed by this, her fieldwork became an investigation intothe sometimes congruent, sometimes contrastive, but always overlapping conceptualizationsand practices of the secular-religious. Utilizing a Weberian notion of affinities for her analysis,each chapter in her book examines a different field of intersection including the dissemina-tion and acquisition of knowledge, the power of the visual in learning, and the spirituality ofman. In each instance, she urges the reader to see various ways the secular and religious areintertwined.

Luehrmann is at her best in her historical sections. She deftly demonstrates the complex,uneven, and very dynamic ways secularism was advanced in the USSR. She argues, for ex-ample, that policy makers, ideologues, and cultural workers, understood religion as somethingsimultaneously unifying and isolating. Each conceptualization implied a different threat to thecultivation of a new socialist society. These complex understandings of religion, Luerhmannshows, demanded unique, sometimes contradictory, forms of attack. She also describes how,at certain historical junctures, the methodicians were themselves ill-prepared for and over-burdened by their work and how, through teaching atheism, they too were learning what anormal Soviet person was. Luehrmann likewise provides detailed insight into how centraldictates and ideas about religion and the fight against it were interpreted and implemented ata local level. She pays close attention to how centrally generated lecture titles, for example,gave methodicians direction for their instructional endeavors but allowed for creativity andadaptation to the local contexts. In each of these areas, and in many others, her work demon-strates not only the complex ways in which secularism was taught but how people learned,as she says, ‘what was expected of them’ (p. 96). In doing so she is able to demonstrate howcertain forms—modes of learning, methods of establishing authority, or manners of cultivatingspirituality—created and utilized during the atheist campaigns persisted and were modified topost-Soviet religious endeavors. This persistence of form and the way methodicians used andadapted it to new ideas is the core of her historical and ethnographic argument.

Well-researched and rich in detail, Luehrmann’s book contains much for the area specialist.But, when it comes to its chief preoccupation, namely the nature of late Soviet secularism,the book delivers arguments intriguing for a broader readership. Using Taylor’s definition tohighlight one of the congruencies between Soviet and Liberal secularisms, she argues that the


two diverge with reference to ideas about individualism and privatized religion. Luehrmanndemonstrates that methodicians’ attempts to rid the region of religion were focused not juston an individual’s belief and practice but on at total transformation of the collective modeof being. Soviet secularism targeted society as the object of transformation. One of the keymeans through which “Soviet society secularized itself” (p 13), she argues, was through anever increasing didactic public (p. 11).

In contrast to other secularism however “policymakers never thought of anyone’s convictions asa private matter” (p. 9) so their didactic interventions extend forcefully into domestic arrange-ments. Soviet secularism, she argues, was engaged in forming new scopes of connectednessconstructed through and in reference to the state. This contrasts to what she sees as the liberalideal of secularism, which forbids public coercion, especially by state or state-allowed actors,and permits individual belief in the private sphere. Unfortunately Luehrmann has a tendencyto contrast Soviet secularism with an ideal type of the liberal version, rather than its variousactually existing instances. These instances reveal much more congruence with Soviet secular-ism than Luehrmann allows, especially on the nature of the coercive state and its interventioninto private spheres.

While excellent in illuminating socialist secularism, Luehrmann is less effective in her ex-ploration of contemporary secularism in Marij El. She fruitfully compares Soviet era culturalworkers and contemporary religious promoters, but one longs to hear about those today inMarij El who are less certain about, less invested in, or simply against religion. Perhaps be-cause they are less actively involved in teaching and converting they fall from view. This raisesthe interesting question: how does contemporary secularism thrive and advance?

These two critiques are, however, minor matters. Luehrmann’s book is well written andexcellently researched. It provides much-needed understanding of the late-Soviet atheistendeavors. Importantly, by showing how Soviet secularism diverged from liberal projects, itmakes a valuable contribution to conceptualizations of secularism.

Scott MatterRutgers University

I Say to You: Ethnic politics and the Kalenjin in KenyaGabrielle Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

How should scholars make sense of the eruption of violence in the aftermath of Kenya’scontested 2007 General Election, in which over 1,000 people were killed and almost 700,000displaced in less than two months? And, in light of the modernization narratives of previouseras—that ethnicity would fade away as decolonization reshaped societies around theworld—what do scholars make of the fact that this violence was overwhelmingly carried outalong ethnic lines? Taking on these complex and contentious problems, Lynch uses a casestudy of the Kalenjin of western Kenya, the main antagonists in that country’s persistentethno-political violence over the past twenty years, to analyze the “construction, development,political relevance, and appeal of ethnic identity over time” and argues that “the constructednature of ethnic identities is the source of ethnicity’s attraction and danger, as selectiveand interpreted histories are used to unite some and differentiate others in ways that aremeaningful, contested, and unstable” (p. 1–2, emphasis in original).


Lynch makes three important theoretical contributions that also have practical implicationsfor policy and social change. Lynch skillfully argues that political ethnicity can, and may nec-essarily, be both a bottom-up source of collective identity and a product of elite manipulation,drawing on John Lonsdale’s critical formulation of the relationship between moral ethnicity andpolitical tribalism. Pointing out that this conceptual distinction has been misconstrued in thepast to be a binary that counterposes positive and negative manifestations of ethnic construction,she argues that elites can not simply incite ethnic sentiment, exclusive ethnic politics, and inter-communal violence out of nothing. They must draw upon and reinforce existing popular notionsof shared culture, language, and experience as well as narratives of difference, inequality, andrisk. Leaders who seek to counter or avoid making use of such popular political discourserisk losing support and face accusations of being out-of-touch with the experiences of theirconstituents.

While ethnic identities may be consolidated under new ethnonyms by opinion leaders andculture brokers, they are built from shared interpretations of the past, and often based onperceived and experienced marginalization that contributes to an angstkomplex that drives ex-clusive and potentially violent ethnic politics. These shared pasts, expressed through historicalnarrative, rely on collective memory and are subject to negotiation and reinterpretation; pro-cesses that allow for the boundaries between us and other to be shifted over time in response tochanging political circumstances. In the Kalenjin case, Lynch illustrates not only the historicalemergence of a new ethnic category as diverse communities speaking closely-related dialectsengaged with colonization and independence, but also how membership in this confederationhas evolved in connection with debates about inclusion in or exclusion from flows of statepatronage. Ethnic and political unity among Kalenjin-speaking sub-groups is not a given,but rather must be constantly renegotiated amidst tensions that include dissatisfaction aboutinequality between communities under the Kalenjin umbrella.

These debates often reach their apex at critical junctures—in Kenya during all-importantelection campaigns in which leaders, as heads of ethnically organized political parties, competenot just for office but for control of a state apparatus whose resources have routinely beenappropriated for private gain. Constituencies dominated by Kalenjin-speakers and consideredto be part of Kalenjin territory have tended to vote overwhelmingly along ethnic lines, evenwhile protesting the failure of their leaders, as ethnic big men, to share the rewards of powerbeyond narrower personal and sub-ethnic networks. Lynch attributes this phenomenon tospeculative ethnic loyalty—“calculation of the potential advantages of electing communityspokesmen” (p. 9)—toward potential patrons out of hope for redress of historical grievances,and to the mobilization of narratives recounting worse hardship when ethnic others havebeen in power. Despite past failures to provide for their clients, political leaders may becomebenefactors and protectors in the future, a situation far more likely when they are subject todemands based on moral ethnicity than leaders of other ethnicities would be.

To illustrate these critical arguments, Lynch presents a historically-oriented analysis focusedmainly on opinion leaders and culture brokers, organized chronologically beginning with theemergence of “Kalenjin” as an ethnic identity in the late-colonial (1940–1960) context of risinganti-colonial activity and ending with discussion of the crisis of post-election violence in 2008and its implications for the future of Kenyan politics. While this material is richly described,more ethnographic detail about the experiences of non-elites would be invaluable. Given herarguments about the crucial links between elite and non-elite in the articulation of instrumentalmanipulation and popular discourse, it would be illuminating to learn more about the voterswho support ethnic demagogues and the youth-cum-warriors who carry out ethnically targetedviolence from their own perspective. There is a clear difficulty in doing this, however, due to


the sensitivity of the subject matter and the ethnographic context. The keleidoscopic Kalenjinethnicity is not easily amenable to grassroots ethnography, especially if, as Lynch argues, itinvolves a fractious collection of sub-ethnicities that may be claimed to be distinct from oneanother or from the whole, rather than a unified category that has superceded older, morespecific identities. Further, the ethical dilemmas involved in working with and writing aboutindividuals who have committed violent crimes and atrocities and who will most likely neverbe brought to justice are daunting. At the same time, the limited overt use of the more than250 interviews she carried out over five years may be as much a reflection of the challengesof writing ethnographically about African politics—an endeavour often heavily influencedby the disciplinary conventions of history and political studies—as her cautious handling ofsensitive, emotive content. This forgivable weakness notwithstanding, Lynch’s impressivelydetailed historical accounts of the intrigues of Kenyan and Kalenjin politics are compelling,especially when they conflict with previous interpretations, if sometimes dizzying and perhapsdifficult for readers less familiar with these ceaseless dramas to digest.

Overall, Lynch has written a wonderful book; a commendable work that sheds light on Kenya’speriodic crises of ethno-political violence and on the sometimes life or death struggles involvedin trying to capture and maintain control of the state, as well as the incredible challenge facedby Kenyans seeking to effect change. The theoretical and empirical contribution of this bookwill resonate with readers interested in the politics of ethnicity and the culture of ethnic politics,and in how these often perpetuate widespread injustice and suffering.

Gillian HarkinsUniversity of Washington

REVIEW ESSAYSex Offenses and the Imaginaries of Punitive Reason

Sex Panic and the Punitive StateRoger N. Lancaster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Hound Pound Narrative: Sexual Offender Habilitation and theAnthropology of Therapeutic Intervention

James B. Waldram (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)

The sex offender has been labeled the monster of our times. The past two decades have seenthe dramatic rise of mandatory sex offender registries and community notification practices aswell as sexually violent predator laws and indefinite civil commitment for people perceived atrisk to commit sex offenses. These new technologies of surveillance and punishment representsex offenders as compulsive creatures who can only be deterred through expanded policingand penality. And among sex offenders, those who have sex with children are characterizedas particularly inhuman and incorrigible. Thus laws expressly targeting sex offenders—mostfrequently sex offenders against children—transform society as a whole, including how modesof imagination and reason intersect with domains of the state.

Recent academic studies of sex offenders have often split focus between imaginary offenders—or “making monsters” (Lancaster p. 59)—and the actual human beings who populate the cellsand institutions forged through such penal imaginaries. Roger Lancaster’s Sex Panic and


the Punitive State (2011) and James Waldram’s Hound Pound Narrative: Sexual OffenderHabilitation and the Anthropology of Therapeutic Intervention (2012) exemplify these twoapproaches to the contemporary sex offender. Lancaster examines the sex offender as a monsteror folk demon, asking how populist imaginaries helped craft the punitive state. According toLancaster, 1960s and 1970s crime panics were transformed into 1980s and 1990s panics aboutchildren’s vulnerability to sexual predators. Sex panic produced the neoconservative conditionsfor expanded penalty, which in turn was incorporated into the specific mode of United Statesneoliberalism associated with the punitive state. Waldram, on the other hand, examines theexperiences of people incarcerated for sex offenses. Waldram takes his readers into the HoundPound of a therapeutic prison in Canada, an institutional space where prisoners participate inCognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to demonstrate readiness to re-enter society. Here menundergo a contradictory process of narrative reformation in which their own imaginaries comeunder strict scrutiny for signs of moral habilitation and conformity to therapeutic paradigms.

Given their very different approaches, these two texts provide a unique overview of thelandscape of sex offender policing and punishment, revealing how new institutional and inter-subjective relations emerge within this landscape. Lancaster makes a strong case for using “sexpanic” to understand the “punitive turn” (p. 222) in U.S. popular, political, and legal culture.Lancaster takes up familiar definitions of sex panic to argue that sexuality offers a particularlyfertile ground for imaginary threats to social hygiene and moral order. Earlier twentieth centurypanics, such as the 1937 invention of sex crime by the New York Times, FBI Director J. EdgarHoover’s “war on the sex criminal” (p. 33), and the sexual psychopath statutes of the 1950s,laid the groundwork for 1970s anti-homosexuality “Save Our Children” (p.42) campaigns and1980s panics about the sexual abuse of children in daycare settings. In the later twentiethcentury U.S., sex panic about pedophilia or child predators in particular fueled a “paranoidstyle” (p. 186) that fostered greater demands for punishment and retribution. The dismantlingof the welfare state and the turn to the punitive state depended upon these sex panics, ratherproducing them (as other scholars have argued). This is a shift in dominant interpretationsof the emergence of punishment through neoliberal restructuring. For Lancaster, “crime andsex panics bridge the gap between social backlash and economic retrenchment” (p. 138),providing a more contingent, ad hoc, and discontinuous “history of the neoliberal punitive state”(p. 220). Thus even as Lancaster notes the limits of sex panic as an explanatory concept, hereminds readers that the concept of “economic panic” (p. 31) is no less problematic, particularlywhen used to explain complex institutional and interpersonal change.

These broader structural claims are outlined in the book’s Part Two (primarilyChapters 7 and 8), where Lancaster makes the clearest case for the central role of sex panicin the structural adjustment of U.S. society. Part One unfolds in a more provisional way,seemingly performing the ad hoc and contingent historiography theorized in the final chapters.Lancaster describes his method as a “mix of fine-grained analysis, robust polemic, and ethno-graphic writing” (p. 17), with Part One in particular moving between summaries of existingresearch, legal case histories, the ethnography of a friend’s false accusation of sexual offenses,and stories from the author’s own youth. These earlier chapters offer a somewhat familiaranalysis—“sex panics give rise to bloated imaginings of risk, inflated conceptions of harm,and loose definitions of sex” (p. 2)—found in work by Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, JamesKincaid, and Judith Levine (among others). But these chapters also provide a thick descriptionof existing scholarship and law, including a more precise elaboration of how homosexual stigmaintersects with racist mobilizations of sex crime in the making of the white pedophile as folkmonster. Here he adds to existing scholarship by exploring how white middle class protocols ofhygiene and purity are imaginatively universalized even as that class is structurally dismantled,


resulting in a populism whose “paranoid style” (p. 186) is institutionalized in legal and socialregimes of punishment. According to Lancaster such institutionalization is achieved throughthe “rhetorical forms” of “moral entrepreneurs”(p.220) whose alleged prognostic powers link“punishment to imagined risks and anticipated future victimizations”(p. 11).

Waldram picks up where Lancaster leaves off: inside the “actuarial illogic”(Lancaster p. 80) organizing sex offender treatment inside carceral facilities. Waldram’s ethnog-raphy depicts the experiences of men incarcerated for sex offenses in Canadian federal prisonwho are admitted to a therapeutic prison unit for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Inthis unit men live for eight months in a collective space that blurs the line between “custodyand caring” (p. 26). They participate in group therapy and shared housing organized around“the Bubble,” a “combined nursing and security station” (p. 27) whose glass walls allow staffand inmates mutual observation. This “panoptic” is linked to the “synoptic” (p. 45) of thetherapeutic process itself—all participants must participate in a process of narrative disclosurethat includes an Autobiography (treated in Chapter Five), a Crime Cycle (Chapter Six), and aRelapse Prevention Plan (Chapter Seven). Each step in this process requires the participant topresent a narrative that is subject to public interrogation and at times combative revision fromnurses and other prisoners. Successful completion of each step requires the participant to adapttheir own subjective narrative to what Waldram theorizes as a “paradigmatic” (p. 10) narrativeadjusted to fit the putative forensic facts in their profile and the principles and theories of CBT.The aim of this process is to reduce the risk of re-offending upon return to society, which issomewhat paradoxical since men too near release are not admitted in the program and thosewho complete the program are often returned to carceral facilities.

This tension between paradigmatic “habilitation” (p. 11) and actuarial prediction is a centralfocus of Waldram’s analysis. In order to be admitted to this unit, the prisoner must have apsychological diagnosis that can be treated. And yet sex offenses are crimes, not psychiatricdisorders, and the fantasies and urges subject to therapeutic intervention inside prison are not“criminal activity” (p. 53). CBT bridges the gap between this “forensic black hole” (p. 75)and paradigmatic habilitation. Participants must come to identify and reduce those “cognitivedistortions” (p. 55) or “thinking errors” (p. 59) that cause sexual offenses and to replace theseerrors with paradigmatically acceptable thoughts. They must then express CBT approved affec-tive responses such as anger management and empathy along with those thoughts. Participantsuccess is achieved by persuading other inmates and staff that CBT cognitive and affectivestrategies have been subjectively adopted while at the same time scoring appropriately onforensic tools such as phallometric testing (p. 69) and “risk assessment instrument[s]” (p. 69)such as the Static 99 assessment tool or the Violence Risk Scale—Sexual Offender Version(VRS-SO). CBT codes assumed predictive of supposed success outside prison are subject toforensic verification inside prison, under static conditions that cannot match the dynamics ofeither the nontherapeutic prison or the outside world. This does little to enable success forprisoners who are returned to prison or for those who are released into society; the formermust return to the “con code” (p. 67) at odds with CBT, the latter to the brand of “modern-daylepers” (p. 217) facing the stigma, isolation, and paranoia described by Lancaster.

Both Lancaster and Waldram reflect on the anthropological challenges posed by research on sexoffenders. First, they both suggest that their research findings require alternative strategies ofrepresentation. For Lancaster, this mixes ethnographic material with scholarship synthesis anddirect address (what he calls polemic), presumably to counter the existing “rhetorical forms”of “moral entrepreneurship” (p. 220) which dominate the topic. For Waldram, this results in acomplex and “jagged” (p. 21) form interspersing direct citation of research subjects and moreconversational inter-chapters with his own analysis. Waldram also points out the problem


of doing ethnography in “nonvoluntary contexts” (p. 22) and the difficulty of gaining trustfrom both incarcerated subjects and corrections staff who perceived participant observation as“loitering” (p. 35). Second, they both describe the limits of “social suffering” (Waldram, p. xi) asa preferred focus of anthropological research. Waldram suggests recent anthropology exhibitsa bias toward studies of the sympathetic or oppressed, which can discourage developmentof deeply needed ethnographic approaches to the experience of reviled or oppressive groups.Lancaster launches a more sustained critique, arguing that “lov[ing] trauma” (p. 181) is lessan ethnographic problem than a dominant cultural logic produced through the punitive turn.He argues “the Left” should “reconsider its fixation on injury” (p. 212) as political strategyand instead consider “getting over it” (p. 205) or “forgetting of trauma” (p. 244) as a strategy.As Lancaster summarizes his position: “Injury ennobles no one; it makes no one any smarter;it gives no one insight beyond the simple experience of pain”(p. 212). The only thing itenables is a “perverse politics of identity” (p. 212) which “can only be the psychological andorganizational building blocks of the punitive state” (p. 213).

Lancaster’s rather bold pronouncement draws attention to the limits of his own approachto sex offenders as well as the central role concepts of reason—in contrast to paranoia andinjury—have in both studies. Lancaster is right that enclosing distributions of humanity in apenal logic of injury, especially one that can be rationalized through a “forensic black hole”(Waldram p. 75) and CBT, is a problem. But Lancaster’s analysis of paranoid style overlyuniversalizes “loving trauma”and the politics of injury. Valorization of trauma and injurymay be a rhetorical form used by various moral entrepreneurs, but this moral and politicalvalorization does not operate uniformly across institutions and actors. One easy counter-example can be found in Waldram’s text, in which incarcerated subjects are cognitively andaffectively denied a subjective narrative of injury—their empathy training does not allow themto draw explicitly on their own experiences of abuse or pain. Waldram clarifies that a specificmode of paradigmatic (and forensically verifiable) reason is at the heart of both diagnosis andtreatment of offenders. Yet Waldram reminds readers that the line between reason and paranoiais highly variable across institutional spaces, since CBT reason requires adopting cognitive andaffective behaviors that are maladaptive to their future contexts (whether prison or society).Situated in relation to Waldram’s study, Lancaster’s own argument that we should replaceloving trauma with “getting over it” (p. 205) might also be characterized as paranoid. Neitherloving nor forgetting injury address the complex conditions in which recognition and harm aredistributed in subjective or paradigmatic modes of penality. Read together, these books taskscholars to find new ways to contest the inequitable distributions of power and resources whichconceal negative impacts (or constructed suffering) on human lives and communities and toreveal how heterogeneous affects and imaginaries may be mobilized against the forensic andparadigmatic reason of carceral penality.

These two books offer an important overview of institutional practices related to sex offenses inNorth America. Waldram’s Canadian case undermines Lancaster’s U.S. exceptionalism, sincethere are similar legal and institutional mechanisms in place across North America (Canadianlaw is outlined in Waldram’s Chapter Three). And Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) ispopular as a treatment technique inside U.S. facilities as well, including facilities specificallyfor sexual offenders such as the Butner Federal Correctional Institute in North Carolina. Bothtexts also confirm the statistical preponderance of white men sentenced for sex offenses againstchildren (although Waldram points out that his regional case study was anomalously 50/50white and Aboriginal). There is certainly an urgent need for analyses of this sort, and bothbooks contribute importantly to understanding emerging regimes of penality and penitence.

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