Book reviews

Stephen Cornell, THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE: AMERICAN INDIAN POLITICAL RESURGENCE, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, 278 pp., $29.95.

Jack D. Forbes, BLACK AFRICANS AND NATIVE AMERICANS: COLOR, RACE AND CASTE IN THE EVOLUTION OF RED‐BLACK PEOPLES, Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988, 334 pp., £35.00.

Maryon McDonald, ’WE ARE NOT FRENCH!’: LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN BRITTANY, London: Routledge, 1989, 384 pp., £40.00.

Ronald Grigor Suny, THE MAKING OF THE GEORGIAN NATION, London: I. B. Taurus and Co. Ltd., 1989, ix‐395 pp., £29.50.

Shlomo Deshen, THE MELLAH SOCIETY: JEWISH COMMUNITY LIFE IN SHERIFIAN MOROCCO, translated and revised from the Hebrew by the author. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, xii + 152 pp., £23.95 and £9.50 (paper).

Roger Waldinger, Howard Aldrich, Robin Ward and Associates, ETHNIC ENTREPRENEURS: IMMIGRANT BUSINESS IN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES, Sage Series on Race and Ethnic Relations, vol. 1., Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990, 226 pp., £29.25 and £13.95 (paper).

Saul Dubow, RACIAL SEGREGATION AND THE ORIGINS OF APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1919–36, St Antony's and Macmillan, London, 1989, xi and 250 pp., £35.00.

Mark Duffield, BLACK RADICALISM AND THE POLITICS OF DE‐INDUSTRIALISATION: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF INDIAN FOUNDRY WORKERS, Avebury, 1988, 226 pp., £24.50.

John Eade, THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY: THE BANGLADESHI COMMUNITY IN EAST LONDON, Avebury, 1989, 213 pp., £24.00.

Nicole Hahn Rafter (ed.), WHITE TRASH: THE EUGENICS FAMILY STUDIES 1877–1919, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988, 382 pp., £36.00.

Neil R. McMillen, DARK JOURNEY ‐ BLACK MISSISSIPPIANS IN THE AGE OF JIM CROW, Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1989, N.P.L.     

The whiteness of race knowledge: Charles Mills throws down the gauntlet

With assiduous logic and political acumen, Charles Mills challenges the whiteness of race knowledge, with particular reference to philosophy and sociology. In different ways and against their professed intentions, generations of philosophers and sociologists have practised an “epistemology of ignorance” that obscures and elides white supremacy or actually confers it with legitimacy. Mills challenges scholars to cast off these obsolete and discredited epistemologies. Furthermore, he advances a conception of “black radical liberalism” that combines progressive strands of the Western thought into a powerful amalgam that could provide a promising emancipatory framework for political thought and action.     

"Kissing a Baby Is Not at All Good for Him": Infant Mortality, Medicine, and Colonial Modernity in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines

Feminist scholars have begun to consider the ways indigenous practices of child rearing were and are challenged in (post)colonial discourse and practice, and how these practices have become a terrain on which definitions of nation, state, and economy are contested. In this article, I adopt a historical anthropological approach to consider how Filipino child-rearing strategies were described and stigmatized in educational, public health, and public welfare discourses in the U.S.-occupied Philippines in the early 20th century. I demonstrate how public health practices and discourses that were generated as part of a "benevolent" campaign against high rates of infant mortality were strategically used as a weapon against Filipino arguments for independence. I also consider how discourses constructing Filipino caregivers as overly indulgent were linked to metropolitan concerns about production of the "new industrial man" and were used to develop a racialized critique of the cultural practices of Filipinos.     

Unemployment and disposable workers in Philadelphia: Just how far have the bastards gone?

Drawing on ethnographic research in Philadelphia, this article illustrates the ravages of a capitalism moving beyond worker alienation to worker disposability. Uneven geographic development within the context of neoliberalism is destroying marginal workers' tools of social reproduction and creating ‘disposable workers.’ Workers in deindustrialized East Kensington are pushed out in a process of neighborhood imperialism, as the community they depended upon for survival is creatively destroyed by finance capitalists and gentrifiers.     

Activity patterns in New Kingdom Nubia: An examination of entheseal remodeling and osteoarthritis at Tombos

The effects of Egyptian imperial expansion into Nubia during the New Kingdom Period (1,550–1,069 BC) have been debated. Here, the impacts of the Egyptian Empire are investigated through an examination of osteological indicators of activity at the archaeological site of Tombos. Entheseal changes to fibrocartilaginous attachment sites and osteoarthritis are examined to infer what types of physical activities this colonial town was engaging in. Many of the skeletal remains at Tombos were comingled due to looting in antiquity; undisturbed burials are presented as a subsample of the population (n = 28) in which age, sex, and body size can be considered. The total sample (n = 85) is then analyzed to better understand overall levels of activity. A number of Nile River Valley bioarchaeological samples are used as points of comparison to the Tombos population. Results indicate that the inhabitants of Tombos had relatively low entheseal remodeling scores; this is highlighted when Tombos is juxtaposed with comparative samples, particularly in men. Furthermore, osteoarthritis, as assessed by eburnation, was also markedly infrequent at Tombos. Collectively, these results indicate a relatively low level of activity and support the hypothesis that Tombos may have served as an administrative center. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the Archaeology of Empire

ABSTRACT  The archaeology of empire is permeated by sexual narratives. This has been especially true of archaeological research on the Spanish Americas, where the material remains of colonial settlements have often been interpreted as products of a literal and figurative marriage between two cultures. However, investigating colonization as a consensual domestic arrangement has masked the ways in which imperial projects relied on the exercise of power, including sexual regulations and sexual coercion. Recent archaeological and ethnohistoric research at the Spanish-colonial military settlement of El Presidio de San Francisco affords a different perspective, one in which the public and institutional exercise of sexual control was central to the imperial project.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives</Emphasis>: William Sollas’s (1849–1936) Anthropology from Disappointed Bridge to Trunkless Tree and the Instrumentalisation of Racial Conflict

During the first decades of the 20th century, many anthropologists who had previously adhered to a linear view of human evolution, from an ape via Pithecanthropus erectus(today Homo erectus) and Neanderthal to modern humans, began to change their outlook. A shift towards a branching model of human evolution began to take hold. Among the scientific factors motivating this trend was the insight that mammalian evolution in general was best represented by a branching tree, rather than by a straight line, and that several new fossil hominids were discovered that differed significantly in their morphology but seemed to date from about the same period. The ideological and practical implications of imperialism and WWI have also been identified as formative of the new evolutionary scenarios in which racial conflict played a crucial role. The paper will illustrate this general shift in anthropological theory for one particular scientist, William Sollas (1849–1936). Sollas achieved a synthesis of human morphological and cultural evolution in what I will refer to as an imperialist model. In this theoretical framework, migration, conflict, and replacement became the main mechanisms for progress spurred by ‘ ȁ8nature’s tyrant,’ natural selection.     

Does infectious disease cause global variation in the frequency of intrastate armed conflict and civil war?

Geographic and cross‐national variation in the frequency of intrastate armed conflict and civil war is a subject of great interest. Previous theory on this variation has focused on the influence on human behaviour of climate, resource competition, national wealth, and cultural characteristics. We present the parasite‐stress model of intrastate conflict, which unites previous work on the correlates of intrastate conflict by linking frequency of the outbreak of such conflict, including civil war, to the intensity of infectious disease across countries of the world. High intensity of infectious disease leads to the emergence of xenophobic and ethnocentric cultural norms. These cultures suffer greater poverty and deprivation due to the morbidity and mortality caused by disease, and as a result of decreased investment in public health and welfare. Resource competition among xenophobic and ethnocentric groups within a nation leads to increased frequency of civil war. We present support for the parasite‐stress model with regression analyses. We find support for a direct effect of infectious disease on intrastate armed conflict, and support for an indirect effect of infectious disease on the incidence of civil war via its negative effect on national wealth. We consider the entanglements of feedback of conflict into further reduced wealth and increased incidence of disease, and discuss implications for international warfare and global patterns of wealth and imperialism.     

Trauma and violence in the Wari empire of the Peruvian Andes: warfare, raids, and ritual fights

This study examines bioarchaeological evidence for violence during the period of Wari imperialism in the Peruvian Andes through analysis of skeletal trauma from three populations dating to AD 650-800. The samples are from contemporaneous archaeological sites: Conchopata, a Wari heartland site in central highland Peru; Beringa, a community of commoners in the Majes valley of the southern Wari hinterland; and La Real, a high status mortuary site, also in the Majes valley. Given the expansionist nature of Wari and its military-related iconography and weaponry, it is hypothesized that Wari imperialism was concomitant with greater levels of violence relative to other prehispanic groups in the Andes. It is also hypothesized that differential articulation with the Wari empire (e.g., heartland vs. hinterland groups) affected the frequency and patterning of trauma. Results show that cranial trauma frequency of the three Wari era samples is significantly greater than several other Andean skeletal populations. This suggests that Wari rule was associated with high levels of violence, though it may not have always been related to militarism. The three adult samples show similar frequencies of cranial trauma (Conchopata = 26%; Beringa = 33%; La Real = 31%). This may suggest that differential positioning in the Wari empire had little effect on exposure to violence. Sex-based differences in cranial trauma frequencies are present only at La Real, but wound patterning differs between the sexes: females display more wounds on the posterior of the cranium, while males show more on the anterior. These data suggest that Wari rule may have contributed to violence.