A Measure of the Measure of Measuring

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST BOOK REVIEWS Special Review Section on The Seductions of Quantification by Sally Engle Merry Review Success through Failure: Translation, Temporal Tricks, and Numeric Concept-Work DOI: 10.1111/aman.13179 Andrea Ballestero Rice University In The Seductions of Quantification, Sally E. Merry provides a most welcome study of how international organizations “use of numbers to describe social phenomena in countable and commensurable terms” (p. 1). She centers on the use of indicators, a subset of numbers designed to provide precise meaning to complex social processes. Indicators aim to bound the meaning of such processes, to prescribe the ways we understand them, and to narrow the options we see as appropriate ways to intervene in them. Their purpose is to naturalize the scope of a social phenomenon as a measured and measurable concept so that comparisons in time and comparisons across cases can be made. Merry’s book centers on how these indicators are made in three areas: human trafficking, violence against women, and human rights. Using a “genealogical method,” the book traces the decisions, hesitations, exclusions, and translations that lead to the crystallization of particular ideas, data sets, and boundaries as constitutive of those phenomena. Merry navigates United Nations and governmental offices, excavates resolutions and precedents, and traces reports circulating between international bodies to show how indicators come to articulate the relation between international and national contexts in the definition of these three areas of political intervention. One of the reasons Merry’s book is so welcome is that it contributes to a growing anthropological literature that carefully attends to the technical qualities of different numbering regimes (Ballestero 2014; Fiske 2017; Guyer 2004; Nelson 2015; Verran 2010). These studies of quantification and numbers in legal and political spaces avoid bracketing the technical intricacies of different quantification schemas and their distinct implications. They avoid erasing the distinctions between kinds of numbers and their consequences. Merry also avoids that gloss and goes further by offering a methodology, the genealogical approach, as a tool to trace the rich histories and struggles behind the making of indicators. This method reveals how indicators based on counts are different from those that are based on ratios, for example. Differently calculated indicators embody different social and conceptual relations; they reflect different assumptions about causality, and, ultimately, as Merry powerfully articulates, they reflect different social theories about how the world works. Another insightful contribution of the book stems from Merry’s decision to explicitly account for how those social theories are not only conceptual inspiration but part and parcel of the everyday work that brings indicators into existence. In the case of human rights indicators, the contests between social theories, some legal and some economic, result in the conflict between an approach that privileged the attributes of a right, supported by lawyers, and an approach that favored the structure-process-outcome theories of development economists (p. 185). These observations remind ethnographers that theory, as a form of abstraction and generalization that explains relationalities in different ways, is itself a lively part of the worlds we study. This approach allows Merry to map not only what specific understandings of the world become asserted via indicators but, most importantly, what dynamics make that assertion possible. Here, Merry diagnoses a powerful theoretical dynamic that entails a process of association—a linkage between a number and certain social theory—and a process of repetition, made possible by the inertia that leads people involved in the creation and use of indicators to reproduce existing data and knowledge. As indicators circulate, they solidify that dynamic until an indicator is naturalized and a number comes to stand for a theory, and a theory for a number. This intimate and intricate relation becomes unwavering. But despite this self-reinforcing dynamic, Merry shows that indicators are not as solid as they may seem. For instance, one of the critiques of indicators that Merry mobilizes is that they rely on an aura of objectivity to get away with standardizing highly diverse phenomena. By selectively translating that diversity into a homogenous explanation, indicators prescribe specific responses as the only appropriate ones to deal with worldly phenomena (p. 113). Yet, despite taking advantage of that aura of objectivity and prescribing homogenous responses, most users of indicators share a “recognition of their superficiality, simplification, and neglect of context and history” (p. 139). Thus, while capitalizing on the objectivity they supposedly entail, indicators are also recognized as failures. In my view, it is precisely this contradiction that makes them so successful. In other C 2019 by the American Anthropological AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 121, No. 1, pp. 260–286, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433.  Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13179 Book Reviews words, indicators succeed by failing. That failure is intrinsic to the commensuration they attempt to effect, an impossible dream of representing what has already transpired transparently. This impossibility to do what they claim requires constant negotiation of what counts as the world and what theories about the world count. The case studies Merry analyzes present clear evidence of that contradictory character. One after another, we see countries play the “technical game” of fitting in one category and not another. We see technical personnel deploy actions to redefine phenomena in terms of what indicators measure. Thus, as a way to capture the lives of women experiencing violence, or the proliferation of human trafficking operations, or the extent to which a country sees itself as a promoter of human rights, indicator systems fall short. Yet, despite that failure, they still have the power to unleash the work required to make the world formally adapt to and fit that which the indicator system measures. This contradiction yields a rich social life. Those involved in their making know that indicators fail to do what they purport, and yet, given the inertia they help institute, countries and agencies continue to invest energy, funding, and intellectual efforts to change the semiotic reach of previous events and future happenings to strategically fall inside or outside of what an indicator counts. Furthermore, amid all of this creative work, the “information” indicators reveal also incites political mobilization, support for victims, and demands for social change. In other words, their epistemological failure—their incapacity to capture history, context, and complexity—creates the need for more work, more officers, more programs to continue perfecting them. Their failure secures their reproduction rather than leading to their extinction. That failure can be technically described by noting how the commensuration that indicators attempt is at its core a process of translation. The act of asserting the meaning of a concept through a set of indicators is an attempt to travel back in time, to redefine what was so that it reflects what has been agreed it should be in the future, once the indicator has been accepted. This attempt to redefine the past fails, particularly because of an indicator’s intrinsic incapacity to capture the full density of the world, something that is true for any form of representation. In other words, the fact that an indicator fails to capture history and context in all their complexity is intrinsic to the translation process on which all representation depends. But beyond that representational failure, the act of translation also performs an interesting temporal trick. In its attempt to create commensurability, and once an organization adopts it, an indicator extends its reach back in history toward its factual precursor to try to redefine what happened. That reach into the past is shaped not only by the particular theories of the world that underlie the indicator but also, importantly, by its extension into new locations beyond the set of institutions, offices, funding streams, blaming and shaming circles, and multilateral financial bodies where it was created. Indicators 261 reach into worlds well beyond those where they have been created. An indicator’s relation to the future is similarly flawed because instead of capturing unknown future events, an indicator shapes their future happening so that any records produced out of their occurrence fit the social theory the indicator system has accepted as true. Thus, indicators reconstitute what happens in the world, both in the past and the future, while they claim to only describe such a world. That is why their epistemological failure is the source of their power, the impetus that makes them proliferate across all sorts of social institutions. Indicators create the need for new practical and material connections between political, legal, and institutional spaces that have little to do with the density of the world events they claim to capture. In this sense, they are highly efficient world-making devices. The Seductions of Quantification allows us to see how failure and proliferation are intrinsic to indicators’ curious capacity to combine social theory and numbers to affirm the scope and reach of a concept. Accessing the institutional settings from which these figures have emerged makes concrete their genealogy and shows the specific locations and times where that concept work is done. This focus speaks directly to the question of ethnographic theory. I take Merry’s meticulous engagement with the technical worlds that make indicators what they are—narrow definitions of complex phenomena, dependent on the inertia of expertise and data, and failed attempts to translate events—as invitations to expand the reach of what counts as ethnography in the phrase ethnographic theory. Her attention to what others (Riles 2005; Valverde 2009) have dubbed the technicalities of social life, characterized by their dense, modern, and sometimes state-centered forms of knowledge—such as law, economics, and science—helps us reengage those as ethnographic fields. She shows how technical content, often bracketed as of little anthropological interest except when operating as diagnostic of injustice, colonizing schemas, and oppression, is itself a place of ethnographic theorization, a location of social life where worldviews are technical constructions with far-reaching historical consequences. At a time when anthropology is grappling with all sorts of questions about its place in a world where academic jobs are fading, Merry’s work reveals how what anthropology does best is not determined by its location, as if theory happens in seminar rooms only, and applied work happens exclusively in nonacademic offices. This book reminds us to not take for granted the question of how concepts work in the world and how those theorizations shape the limits of the possible inside and outside the seminar room. It shows how the everyday work of theorization and concept creation is of interest for the academic and for the anthropologist beyond the academy as well. In this book, we see how techno-legal theorization and concept work creates worlds. We also see how conceptual definitions matter materially, as they open and close funding streams, institutional programs, and advocacy campaigns. Anthropologists have the skill to trace 262 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 those workings and show the matter for which they matter. Merry’s book is thus a great resource for within and without the seminar room. It shows us how the labor of theorization takes place in multiple and sometimes unexpected locations, under various labor regimes, and with different objectives. As programmatic question and as cultural critique, The Seductions of Quantification is a book that opens space for thought and action. REFERENCES CITED Ballestero, Andrea. 2014. “What’s in a Percentage? Calculation as the Poetic Translation of Human Rights.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 21 (1): 27–53. Fiske, Amelia. 2017. “Natural Resources by Numbers.” Environment and Society 8 (1): 125–43. Guyer, Jane I. 2004. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nelson, Diane. 2015. Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Riles, Annelise. 2005. “New Agenda for the Cultural Study of Law: Taking on the Technicalities.” Buffalo Law Review 53: 973–1034. Valverde, Mariana. 2009. “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal ‘Technicalities’ as Resources for Theory.” Social and Legal Studies 18 (2): 139–57. Verran, Helen. 2010. “Number as an Inventive Frontier in Knowing and Working Australia’s Water Resources.” Anthropological Theory 10 (1–2): 171–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1463499610365383. Magical Thinking DOI: 10.1111/aman.13181 Denise Brennan Georgetown University Doing research on trafficking is maddening. It means taking on sensationalized narratives and wildly exaggerated numbers. Whether it’s Liam Neeson in a movie franchise that peddles caricatures of traffickers or laughable statistics on trafficking into the sex sector during the Super Bowl, narrative and numerical portrayals have produced knowledge about trafficking that has been difficult to unstick. Sally Engle Merry gives us an elaborate analytical tool kit for understanding the persistence of such fanciful claims. The Seduction of Quantification carefully wrestles with the power and intended and unintended consequences of narratives and numbers. Merry’s insight that “those who create indicators aspire to measure the world” end up “creat(ing) the world they are measuring” is perfectly illustrated in the case of trafficking (p. 21). Her wonderfully lucid book helps explain why trafficking became known and unknown, measured and immeasurable. The title says it all. By explaining why claims, no matter how patently bogus, become seductive, Merry embarks on a detailed autopsy of the “magic” of numbers (Merry 2011, S84). She emphasizes the importance of simplicity and clarity, which create a kind of truth “aura.” More baffling, however, is the shelf life of claims that defy logic. Take the preposterous claims about trafficking during the Super Bowl. Every January, antitrafficking scholars brace for yet another round of claims by local police and nongovernmental agencies about an expected rise in trafficking. Before the 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas, police sergeant Louis Felini, for example, predicted that 100,000 women would be trafficked (Kotz 2011). Like a kind of trafficking Groundhog Day, similarly fantastical claims circulated in the run-up to subsequent Super Bowls, even though police departments in cities that had hosted previous Super Bowls had reported no uptick in prostitution-related arrests (Mogulescu 2014). If 100,000 doesn’t pass the smell test, during the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the media reported that one million women— one million!—would be trafficked to meet the demands of sex-starved fans (GAATW 2011; Landler 2006). Merry calls this kind of feverish feedback loop of faulty claims that keep getting repeated the “puzzle” of indicators (p. 139). In the case of trafficking, the staying power of obviously exaggerated claims (what I’ve called “zombie data”) lies with an obsession with sex work and the conflation of sex work and trafficking (Brennan 2017). There is a voyeuristic interest in trafficked persons. Because trafficking survivors rarely get to speak for themselves, the claims that circulate about them often do not reflect their lived reality. When survivors drive the narrative, they are quick to point out that they are more than their experience in forced labor. At a press conference in Washington, DC, in the fall of 2016, one of the trafficking survivors that sits on the US Advisory Council on Human Trafficking passionately reminded the standing-room-only crowd: “What makes us experts is actually not—it’s not the telling of our stories. . . . We bring perspective and knowledge and expertise . . . that literally has nothing to do with our personal trauma stories” (US Department of State 2016). At the same time, trafficking survivors’ trauma stories are a form of capital. Trafficking survivors must provide details of abuse to law enforcement, attorneys, and Homeland Security officials to “prove” their victimhood to qualify for trafficking visas to stay in the United States. While some stories of abuse get “counted” as rising to the level Book Reviews of trafficking, other forms of abuse drop out. The salacious interest in certain stories of abuse—often involving sexual labor—distracts from attention to exploitation in other labor sectors. In other words, the hypervisibility of trafficking into the sex sector causes other instances of migrant labor exploitation to go unnoticed, normalized, and unaddressed. Herein lies the commensurability dilemma of indicators. Using Merry’s sober analysis, we must confront the difficulty of measuring degrees of exploitation in and across labor sectors. As Anderson and O’Connell Davidson (2002, 11) note, there simply is no “universal yardstick” to assess degrees of abuse and thus worthiness of redress and assistance. Entire industries, such as agriculture, rely on low wages and also benefit from the current deportation regime in which exploited workers fear reporting abuse. Operating in a kind of “labor purgatory,” many workers experience exploitation—just not enough to qualify as trafficking (Brennan 2014). The imperative for indicators to be clean, clear, and compelling does not capture gray in what Merry identifies as an “indicator ecology” that only deals in black and white. Unfortunately, understanding how and why certain forms of knowledge gain traction doesn’t help with the herculean task of dislodging false claims and bogus data. A particular set of truth claims have come to dominate public discourse and policy on trafficking. “Once established and recognized,” Merry writes, statistical knowledge “often circulate[s] beyond the sphere envisioned by their original creators” (p. 5). Once false claims and incorrect data take hold, hysteria can follow. In the case of the fight to end trafficking, there has been no putting the genie back in the bottle. Sex workers have experienced the collateral damage (GAATW 2007). If trafficked persons are assumed to be primarily in sex establishments, then raids on brothels and massage parlors have become the solution. Antiprostitution activists have stretched antitrafficking campaigns far beyond the goal of ending forced sexual labor to eliminating the sex sector. The conditions under which people work in the sex sector might not be coercive, but attempts to rescue them can be. These “coercive rescues” result from the elision that a sex worker is necessarily a trafficked person (Brennan 2014). Sex worker rights groups around the world have vehemently rejected this conflation and rescue logic. They argue that as sex workers try to work further underground, their risks—of rape, HIV, and yes, even trafficking—increase. Moreover, this host of antiprostitution policies touted as antitrafficking policies have thwarted, contradicted, and undone the effectiveness of antitrafficking efforts. Beyond measuring who qualifies as “trafficked” and thus who qualifies for assistance and immigration relief, the mother of all trafficking measurements is the US Department of State’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. With terrific skill, Merry painstakingly dissects how this report card on every country’s antitrafficking efforts is assembled. Long pilloried by scholars and the international 263 nonprofit sector, the TIP report is more of a list of the US’s foes and allies than assessment of actual antitrafficking efforts. Because it has sanctions attached to a failing grade, it has positioned the US, as legal scholar Janie Chuang (2006) has observed, as a “global sheriff.” I wish Merry had been in the room when the first TIP report was drafted. With her there, maybe there would have been more careful selection of how data would be gathered, interpreted, and presented. She could have warned that the first report’s maiden attempts at data gathering and data presentation likely would become “settled knowledge” that provides “a kind of unassailable truth” (p. 25). Of course, she could have urged officials to include trafficking survivors in the data gathering and writing process, the very people whose experiences were “being measured” and who “typically lack a voice in the construction of the categories and measurements” (p. 25). Instead, we live with an instrument that is deeply flawed—and influential. When the thing measured is a terrible harm that provokes outrage and calls to do something, moralism, voyeurism, and politics can cloud reason and speed up what should be a careful process. In a landscape of “indicator (il)literacy,” Merry’s The Seduction of Quantification offers a sane and sophisticated roadmap (p. 26). REFERENCES CITED Anderson, Bridget, and Julia O’Connell Davidson. 2002. Trafficking—A Demand-Led Problem? A Multi-Country Pilot Study. Stockholm: Save the Children Sweden. Brennan, Denise. 2014. Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brennan, Denise. 2017. “Fighting Human Trafficking Today: Moral Panics, Zombie Data, and the Seduction of Rescue.” Wake Forest Law Review 52 (2): 477–96. Chuang, Janie. 2006. “The United States as Global Sheriff: Using Unilateral Sanctions to Combat Human Trafficking.” Michigan Journal of International Law 27 (2): 437–94. GAATW (Global Alliance against Traffic in Women). 2007. Collateral Damage: The Impact of Anti-Trafficking Measures on Human Rights around the World. Bangkok: Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. GAATW (Global Alliance against Traffic in Women). 2011. What’s the Cost of A Rumour?: A Guide to Sorting Out the Myths and the Facts about Sporting Events and Trafficking. Bangkok: Global Alliance against Traffic in Women. Kotz, Pete. 2011. “The Super Bowl Prostitute Myth: 100,000 Hookers Won’t Be Showing up in Dallas.” Dallas Observer, January 27. https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/the-super-bowlprostitute-myth-100-000-hookers-wont-be-showing-up-indallas-6424288. Landler, Mark. 2006. “World Cup Brings Little Pleasure to German Brothels.” New York Times, July 3. http://www.nytimes. com/2006/07/03/world/europe/03berlin.html. Merry, Sally Engle. 2011. “Measuring the World: Indicators, Human Rights, and Global Governance.” Current Anthropology 52 (S3): S83–95. 264 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 Mogulescu, Kate. 2014. “The Super Bowl and Sex Trafficking.” New York Times, January 31. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/ 01/opinion/the-super-bowl-of-sex-trafficking.html. US Department of State. 2016. “Panel Discussion on Annual Report.” October 18. https://2009-2017.state.gov/j/tip/rls/ rm/2016/264049.htm. A Measure of the Measure of Measuring DOI: 10.1111/aman.13182 Nayanika Mathur Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford On being asked to comment on The Seductions of Quantification, my instinctive response was to undertake a mental calculation: Q: Is this piece REF-able? (REF is the research excellence framework, a periodic assessment of the publications and outputs of all members of the UK’s higher education system.) A: No. Q: Then how much time away will it take from my “REF outputs”? (REF counts publications, or “outputs,” and then measures and ranks them according to slippery and constantly shifting metrics.) A: Given that it is exam season and I am drowning in student scripts and essays, this would mean X number of hours/days away from that “output” that I need to get in by X date in order for it to be potentially published in time for the REF 2021 cut-off date. Q: Then why should I do this commentary? A: In REF terms, this isn’t a particularly worthy labor-time expenditure, so I should, regretfully, say no. I did, evidently, accept the—as it turns out, delightful— task of writing this comment. In order to do so, I had to willfully combat the above calculation on the basis of the arguments that (1) I really wanted to read this book, and (2) I genuinely enjoy the intellectual labor of reading full monographs and being forced to articulate a coherent, individualized response to them. Somewhat shamefully, I have to admit, however, that the clinching argument really was that I hold a permanent post and, mercifully, have no plans to return to the unforgiving UK academic job market that hinges so fundamentally on “REF-ability”—that is, number and quality of publications as measured by what Merry terms an “indicator culture.” Despite job security, I remain haunted by the audit culture of UK higher education that is so profoundly seduced by quantification and is going deeper down an Orwellian path of quantifying, measuring, and assessing everything ranging from publication depth to teaching quality to policy outreach. In addition to the constant lamentations of UK academics, there is some powerful work that has shown the destructive and coercive effects of these exercises in quantifying knowledge, teaching, and research (Shore and Wright 2000; Strathern 2000). Merry’s work, similarly focused on quantification, takes us down an unexplored ethnographic path of how indicators and measures were devised in the case of human rights, gender violence, and sex trafficking. As such, she shows in glorious detail that all measurements are not the same and that every indicator has its own genealogy and life. Most importantly, she demonstrates why it is important to focus on different forms of quantification and how one might ethnographically do so. Within anthropology and its cognate disciplines, there is a general consensus that quantification is political, problematic, and doesn’t capture reality adequately. Quite unlike the public policy or governance worlds and disciplines like economics, there is no romance for numbers or indices that can be whiffed out. However, Merry’s work takes us much deeper into this dizzying world of numbers, measures, indicators, and audit cultures in at least three distinct ways. First, Merry develops the concept of an “indicator culture,” which in one respect is, as she notes, a dimension of audit culture, but I think it captures a whole range of distinct social and political practices. Indicator culture refers to this now widespread assumption that “all things can be measured and that those measures provide an ideal guide to decision making” (p. 10). Indicator culture is what allows for, for instance, transparency in India to be compared with transparency in Mexico, or for “policy makers to compare freedom in Mauritius and Mauritania, poverty in Sweden and the Sudan, and human rights compliance in Russia and Rwanda despite the vast difference between these countries” (p. 10). In addition to this foundational belief in the measurability of all things, ranging from domestic violence to trafficking to academic success, is this belief in the comparability across social domains, spaces, and constructed trends. Indicator culture, as elaborated by Merry, is what allowed for the growth and popularity of what is called “evidence-based governance,” or, simply, “new governance.” Second, Merry elaborates on how the unmeasurable comes to be measured. For me, this was the most eyeopening aspect of the book. For instance, in the discussion of the measurement of violence against women, Merry discusses the way in which the problem came to be “defined” and the forms of relationships and events that were allowed into the field that eventually led to the construction of certain modalities of counting and measuring violence. This somewhat clinical exploration is juxtaposed with a first-person narrative of a woman suffering from long-term intimatepartner violence. The narrative is chilling on its own, but the starkness of the contrast between the two accounts endures on. Similarly, Merry shows how it is actually impossible to measure human trafficking for various complicated reasons, Book Reviews while also showing how trafficking still comes to eventually be quantified. Third, Merry creatively combines the ethnography of bureaucracy, expertise, numbers, and the spread of technologies of measurement. The ethnographic material of The Seductions of Quantification is remarkable for the depth with which it showcases different sites, dramatis personae, and institutions. It covers widely different practices—human trafficking, human rights, and violence against women— and finds a way to tell the story of how they came to be rendered measurable and comparable by networks of actors and institutions. As such, this book does the hard labor of backtracking on the audit-culture assumption that things get measured and are being constantly quantified in fallacious/problematic manners to show how particular metrics came to be in the very first place. Ultimately, The Seductions of Quantification is a brilliant example of how power comes to be obscured through the projection of objectivity and technical expertise. It unmasks the processes through which we measure violence against women or human rights violation, and the revelation is not one of falsity or artifice but rather contingency, power, expertise, knowledge making, and good intentions. We are walked through incredibly complicated processes and micro-histories of how an indicator is arrived upon, gains widespread acceptance, and is ultimately taken on by a range of powerful actors and organizations. You see both the arrogance of international organizations and the crucial role played by feminists; the importance of localized practices, but also the role of large international summits where agreements are struck and indicators embraced. The focus on the ethnographic and the process of formation of metrics has the effect of making one see that not all indicators are created equally. There are certainly some that appear to bear a closer approximation of reality and others that are largely unreliable. Throughout the book, Merry follows a familiar narrative structure. We are told of a new quantification assessment, how it was conceived, acted upon, and finally gained some form of legitimacy. In each of these substantive ethnographic chapters, we see how the fantasy of objective depiction of reality through a process of quantification and making commensurable and comparative is arrived upon. Yet, toward the end of each assessment of the construction of an indicator, it feels as if the book pulls back from taking the ethnography to its full potential by noting that these indicators might not be effective and are, in fact, deeply produced by power relations, yet hold salience for governance purposes. In the REF example above, or the quantification and measurement of academic productivity, creativity, and policy impact in the UK, there is absolutely no redeeming feature. It is not just that this system of indicators is plain wrong or that it is creating neoliberal subjects that are constantly enmeshed in acts of measuring and indicating and very little else. It is also the fact that this indicator culture might well spell the death of the entire system of higher 265 education in the UK. In other words, the world would be a better place without this indicator culture. Similarly, in my own work in India on corruption (Mathur 2017), I have been struck by how faulty and problematic all measurements of corruption—be it by organizations like Transparency International or the Indian state—are. Corruption perception indices or lack/fullness of transparency measures in India are not just not measuring accurately; by creating highly distorted indices, they are also having a profoundly negative impact on the functioning of the Indian state. Once again, my ethnographic material suggests strongly that the objectives of arresting corruption or ensuring effective governance in India might be better served if there was a wholesale halting of the measurement of corruption and/or transparency. Why, then, does The Seductions of Quantification stop short of taking its argument to what could be a conclusion— that these pretty measures that simplify complex realities and re-present them in accessible modes through numbers, graphs, rankings, and even brightly colored maps—are not just products of power and far less effective/representative than we originally considered them to be and, perhaps just perhaps, we should abandon them entirely? One possible reason could be that this slightly moralizing pronouncement or policy recommendation is not the objective of this remarkable book. The ambition of this work is to chart out how the production and use of global indicators are shaped by inequalities in power and expertise. It accomplishes this objective with a remarkable level of detail and analytical precision. Another reason could be that the ethnography deals largely with the processes through which indicators are created and embraced, not so much with how they affect the lives and souls of those who are being indicatored, so to say. I return to the domestic violence contrast that Merry briefly drew out: the distance between the manner in which violence against women was defined and statistically made real, and the short narrative account of a woman who had experienced years of brutal violence is almost unimaginably vast. The unbridgeable distance is not just between making a (mere) statistic speak to a firsthand account but also between the ethnographic project of elucidating the construction of the former and the living of the latter. In this book, Merry’s concern is with the former. Given that there remains a paucity of ethnographic work on how experts make expertise, how politics and power get converted into objectivity and accessible simplifications, and how bureaucratic bodies actually function as they attempt to govern and regulate the world, this is an incredibly important task. It is also, in critical ways, a more difficult anthropological task due to the methodological challenges of space, sites, knowledge production, and ethnographic-writing mores that it poses. Let me, nevertheless, end with a provocation: How might we come to be unseduced by quantification? Is there a politics of the possible that might draw upon anthropological skills—particularly that immanent in the power of fine ethnographic writing—that could be marshaled to challenge the simplicity and comfort that the quantified provides 266 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 for us? Utopian as it may appear, can indicator culture be undone through a sensitive and engaged form of writing culture? The seeds of such an endeavor surely lie just at the cusp of Merry’s brilliant measure of measuring. REFERENCES CITED Mathur, Nayanika. 2017. “Eating Money: Corruption and Its Categorical ‘Other’ in the Leaky Indian State.” Modern Asian Studies 51 (6): 1796–817. Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 2000. “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education.” In Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, edited by Marilyn Strathern, 57–89. New York: Routledge. Strathern, Marilyn. 2000 “Introduction: New Accountabilities.” In Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, edited by Marilyn Strathern, 1–18. New York: Routledge. The Gender of the Number DOI: 10.1111/aman.13177 Diane M. Nelson Duke University If Clarence took fair Gwendolyn out for an auto ride And if at sixty miles an hour a kiss to capture tried And quite forgot the steering gear on her honeyed lips to sup How soon could twenty men with brooms sweep Clare and Gwennie up? Oh . . . Put down six and carry two Gee but this is hard to do You can think and think and think till your brains are numb. I don’t care what teacher says, I can’t do the sum. –“I Can’t Do the Sum,” Babes in Toyland (Herbert and MacDonough 1903) This epigraph, like Sally Merry’s book, is about seduction, and one that ends rather badly. The songwriters are mining the same gap as Merry does, among, on the one hand, narrative, ethnography, storytelling, the qualitative, and, on the other, the numeric, statistics, indicators, the quantitative. These are C. P. Snow’s (1959) “two cultures,” where one side laments being unable to do the sum and the other kind of shrugs, “I don’t do human (or women’s) rights.” The song seems to come down on the side of the qualifiers since anyone concerned with timing the cleanup is clearly missing the most important thing, the terrible disaster ensuing from Clarence’s thwarted desire, the horror of two young lives cut short. This is not to say, of course, that we should not be concerned with the workers and their labor hours. Merry is quite clear this is not a mathphobic book. She consistently shows the usefulness of numbers and their kin—ratio, percentages, indicators. They are powerful tools to bring attention to abuse and violation, to aggregate (one car accident is a tragedy, traffic deaths increasing 6 percent to 40,200 is cause for action) and disaggregate (how many of those deaths were caused by a man harassing a woman? Are there gender- or race-based pay gaps in the wages of highway sanitation employees? Does a cop killing a Black motorist count as a traffic death?). The Seductions of Quantification draws powerfully on the decades of research and writing that went into “making Merry,” Sally’s indispensable body of work. From her early studies in the United States on “urban danger” and working-class consciousness of the law and popular justice to exploring law in colonizing Hawaii and its role in Fiji, China, India, and the United Nations, NGOs, treaty making and monitoring, this book is a wonderful culmination to all this “sallying forth.” It resonates with her earlier explorations of the abstraction of wordsmithing and the corporate and developmentalism-infused production of indicators, as well as the deeply felt hopes vested in human rights’ promises of freedom, recognition, and social justice. Throughout, she pays compassionate attention to the dogged efforts across vast scales to make good on that promise, attending carefully to gender, to global power inequalities, to relations between the universal and vernacular, and to the labors of translating. She sees the powerful possibilities for struggles for rights through law and number while being exquisitely aware of their problematic genealogies and heartbreaking limits. She is eminently qualified to open the Latourian black box of quantification in human rights struggles and to defetishize the way numbers seem to stand alone. She shows the labor involved in producing something that looks so simple, “objective,” “neutral”—in other words, like a “fact”— revealing instead incredible uncertainty, competing interests, power struggles, and effort. Condensing “innumerable meetings and workshops” (p. 8), Merry mistressfully shows the frameworks, implicit templates, and embedded theories undergirding quantification that are too often hidden in the siren call of efficiency when activists seek to influence wider publics. When I say Merry is qualified, I mean, of course, in the dictionary sense of having the requisite skills, knowledge, and experience that fit her for this position. But I also mean to echo her concerns that, as important as numbers are, they can easily obscure qualitative forms of knowing, “sacrificing the insights of rich, ethnographic accounts” (p. 2). This is important for many reasons, including knowing what numbers are actually enumerating. For example, what “counts” as violence against women in different cultural contexts? Do activists “treasure what is measured” because numbers Book Reviews are so expensive and hard to come by rather than measuring that more elusive quality of what we treasure (p. 196)? What does a number mean when it represents something as illegal, ambiguous, and shadowy as trafficking? But to qualify also means to modify, restrict, limit. While I strongly agree with the conclusion that “the narrative ethnographic account provides an important complement to quantification” (p. 222), we should not lose sight of the innumerable ways qualitative representation is also a product undergirded by implicit templates and unexamined assumptions. We anthropologists and activists who deploy both numbers and stories face the Borges map problem from “On Exactitude in Science” (1999). Neither can fully and faithfully cover the entire terrain. Both are forms of condensation. Both require loss and sacrifice. That odd little librarian Borges leads me to the question, can one write about bureaucrats and their quantifying without mimicking their style? This brings me to two points I find implicit in Merry’s book but worth drawing out. The first concerns the gendered resonances of the title. A seduction is often ambiguous and shadowy: against one’s better judgment, a slip into unreasonableness, “your brains are numb.” It often implies a power differential, a seducer and a victim. While sometimes it’s (the male fantasy of) a femme fatale, more often a dominant man leads a less worldly female astray. The title seems to ask how much we (feminized victims?) “decide” to trust quantification. This returns me to the song’s lament (sung by a woman, as if I need to tell you!). This contrasts with the (often well-meaning) statistician or detective who wants “just the facts, ma’am.” These mimic how the rich ethnographic context often becomes feminized and the efficient, reasonable number takes on a masculine (i.e., more powerful) cast. Such gendered assumptions are the result of a long history of Western numbers that might be dated to Luca Pacioli’s introduction of double-entry bookkeeping to Venice in the 1490s. His how-to guide describes a series of books through which everyday transactions are successively disentangled through abbreviations and translations until in the final account only credits and debits appear, each appears twice, and as the accountant balances the sums “on each set of facing pages . . . virtue was made visible” (Poovey 1998, 43). The first book, the inventory, in which women and young people were allowed to write, was full of homely details like precious things, IOUs, family heirlooms, commonplace sayings, money, stock, jewels, lands, risk, and even pirates (Gleeson-White 2011, 98). The second book remained prolix, noting names of parties, terms of payment, and the details of merchandise. In the last book, the ledger, each transaction was entered—now by men alone—as only a credit or a debit, allowing profit and loss to appear “at a glance” (p. 100). Pacioli has been compared to Copernicus because of the momentousness of this move: “through its encouragement of regular record-keeping, mathematical 267 order, and the reduction of events to numbers abstracted from time and place, double entry fostered a new view of the world as being subject to quantification . . . the heart of the scientific revolution” (167). So perhaps it’s not surprising that human rights activists would find such tools seductive— and virtuous. Here we see many of the components of the “magic of numbers” (p. 127) that Merry engages, and perhaps some solution to what she calls the “puzzle” that they are “used and even considered reliable despite widespread recognition of their superficiality, simplification and neglect of context and history” (p. 139). It was not a scheming patriarchal cabal that transformed major determinants of gain and loss like haggling, labor, and uncertainty into excess, trivial details. But it was also no accident that these became associated with women and youth, who were gradually effaced from the books. The idea that numbers are “hard, even crystalline, mathematical and . . . empirical” (Gleeson-White 2011, 161), and that such attributes “count,” has infrastructured the gender, race, and class relations of the post-1492 world while consolidating a particular version of individualist masculinity. But numbers don’t stand alone: tropic links between disjunctured scales allow for what Jane Guyer (2004) calls “marginal gains,” “profit” of various kinds drawn from and across those edges. For example, number and morality seem to belong to totally different scales (how can a number be “good”?), yet Poovey (1998) says “Virtue” came into play in the ledger, because the system created writing positions that subordinated personality to rules. Just as Merry finds with human rights statistics, these numbers are comparable and checkable via arithmetic, following those formal, disinterested rules, thereby constituting a system in relation to which one could judge right from wrong. “To the extent that numbers were considered disinterested because transparent to their object, so too were those who produced numerical knowledge” (Poovey 1998, 71). Meanwhile, mirrors, chairs (instead of benches), portraiture, and autobiography were beginning to produce (albeit differently for different classes, races, and genders) a generalizable individuality (Stone Allequere 1996). Western philosophy began to settle into what Carolyn Merchant (1992, 49) calls the “mechanical model,” which sees/makes the world as dividable and rearrangeable (because composed of particles), based in a natural order from which knowledge and information are abstractable (i.e., contextindependent), and in which problems can be analyzed into parts that can be manipulated by mathematics. Production practices and liberal property theories based in an individual’s labor transformed what had been dense interactions of human and nonhuman actants into extractible and ownable “natural resources.” Long-standing gender inequalities mixed with racial formations and merged with imperial labor extraction to overtly enslave millions of people and indenture millions more. Thus, humans (some more than others) also came to function as ownable and exploitable “resources.” Useful companions to Merry’s book, Melinda Cooper’s Life 268 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 as Surplus (2015) and Michelle Murphy’s Economization of Life (2017) brilliantly chart the ways these accumulated assumptions undergird and may undermine current-day practices meant, like the human rights efforts Merry engages, to enhance life. Without asking for more than Merry’s concise and wideranging book already does, I think it is useful to remember these genealogies. That might reduce our surprise when these gendered numbers have paradoxical effects as they are turned to the tasks of making gender violence and sex trafficking count. Second, it would counteract the creeping binarism of “two cultures”—with one stronger and more seductive. Quantification is always already qualified (both fit for a job and modified, restricted). This is because, as Jane Guyer reminds us, quantity (number) and quality (kind) are both scales, unanchored in any foundational invariant. They do, however, share linkage points, or thresholds that connect them to each other. Significant performances and institutions, as Merry shows us, can “settle” those linkages, transforming one into the anchor of the others (Guyer 2004, 12, 49–60). But this also means that it may not be enough to “add” ethnographic accounts. My second, briefer, point follows Luce Irigaray (1985). Numbers also have a masculine cast in that they seem to be “one,” singular and universal. But as I’ve learned working with Mayan activists in Guatemala (Nelson 2015)—and from Donna Haraway (1991)—one is not enough. The quantification of double-entry bookkeeping that inaugurated the “modern fact” so seductive to human and women’s rights activists is powerful. But it is a numeric system “which is not one.” It’s an ethno-mathematics forged in a particular time and place through a system that has also created what Haraway (2016) and Jason Moore (2013) call the Capitalocene. So, the problem seems to be not only quantification but the specific kind of quantification. Is it individualistic—having a hard time with structural reasons for rights violations and trafficking? Is it imperial—when it can function in aggregate it imposes capitalist, environment-wrecking, rights-denying “development”? If we are to think and think and think from subject positions produced by such histories, this book is a powerful and indispensable oar, but we’re gonna need a bigger boat. REFERENCES CITED Borges, Jorge Luis. 1999. “On Exactitude in Science.” In Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books. Cooper, Melinda. 2015. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Gleeson-White, Jane. 2011. Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance. New York: W. W. Norton. Guyer, Jane. 2004. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Women. New York: Taylor & Francis. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Herbert, Victor (music), and Glen MacDonough (lyrics). 1903. “I Can’t Do the Sum.” Babes in Toyland. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Merchant, Carolyn. 1992. Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. New York: Routledge. Moore, Jason. 2014. “Introduction: World-Ecological Imaginations.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 37 (3–4): 165–72. Murphy, Michelle. 2017. The Economization of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nelson, Diane M. 2015. Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Snow, C. P. 1959. The Rede Lecture: The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stone Allequere, Roseanne. 1996. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Counting Uncountables DOI: 10.1111/aman.13180 Katherine Verdery Graduate Center, City University of New York Sally Merry’s excellent book The Seductions of Quantification is a devastating critique of the ever-increasing use of numbers for all manner of purposes for which they are rarely appropriate. The book results from the emergence of “indicator culture,” which overvalues numerical data as a form of knowledge and basis for decision making. Its character- istics are “trust in technical rationality, in the legibility of the social world through measurements and statistics, and in the capacity of numbers to render different social worlds commensurable” (pp. 9–10). The book is the culmination of lengthy engagement with the topic, having been preceded by three coedited volumes on it. Even though her subject is very complex, the book is written with exemplary clarity. If you have ever been skeptical about the use of statistics—and we all should be—this is the book for you. Merry writes: “There are no objective numbers: these numbers are clearly interpreted at every step of the way. Book Reviews What appears to be an objective, scientific process of data collection and analysis has important political dimensions and consequences but works largely outside the sphere of political debate and contestation. As such, it constitutes a key dimension of power in the new global governance” (p. 111). Although this is not news, what she is doing with it is new. Many people have written about the place of numbers in the creation of nation-states, but Merry is pioneering the study of how international governance is being created through numbers. It is a much more complex, and fascinating, story. The book’s subject is “indicators,” but what is an indicator? It is “a named collection of rank-ordered data that purports to represent the past or future performance of different units” (p. 12). The hallmark of indicators is the simplification of information. Making them is a highly interpretive and political process involving the creation of categories, which rest on unarticulated theories and, once formed, tend to remain stable over time. Making indicators, then, entails creating named concepts used in measuring. Indicators are used especially by governments and international organizations, such as NGOs, the UN, and so on. Some examples she gives are the UN Human Development Index, the ranked lists of Transparency International, and the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index. Often, indicators appear in colorcoded maps, with “good” countries in green, “bad” in red. The book’s core question is: How are the production and use of indicators shaped by inequalities in power and expertise? That is, how come the people who make them generally come from the “Global North”? To explore this question, she presents three cases: indicators developed to measure violence against women, human trafficking, and human rights. For each, she looks at their different institutional sponsors, the resource base that aliments work on the indicators, and international collaborations underlying it. She broadens her work by frequent reference to other areas, such as science and technology studies and the emerging literature on standards. Merry’s material comes from extensive ethnography in numerous organizations dealing with these subjects, but especially the United Nations organizations responsible for creating many of the indicators for them. She not only spoke with many people in UN organizations but also went to numerous conferences and meetings, such as those of the UN Statistical Commission, and she read numerous reports. Like the process it examines, her research itself was transnational and de-territorialized. It was also extraordinarily systematic. Let me use one extended example to illustrate, from chapter 4 on the violence against women indicators (VAW), which is a tour de force. In this chapter, she shows that those wishing to reduce the occurrence of VAW use one of four different frameworks, each of them incorporating a solution that requires being able to count and measure VAW, as well as to create categories that are commensurable. She shows that each proposed solution has five features (such as its institutional support, its theory about violence against women, and 269 its models for classifying data). As she proceeds, she comes to the conclusion that “violence against women is itself an interpretive category” (p. 89). We have entered a hall of mirrors. Comparing the four different solutions with their various efforts at quantification, she concludes: “This comparison shows that even the apparently simple question of what to count is a fundamental dimension of the power of quantification to shape public knowledge. Discussions about creating indicators often focused on the clarity of the concept and the measurability of the behavior, but there were also important political considerations concerning what was included [or] left out. Although the four approaches claim to be measuring the same thing, they are clearly using different categories and counting different things. In practice, they are not measuring the same thing, even though they are calling it by the same name” (p. 107). Nevertheless, she adds, the very effort to quantify violence against women had the positive effect of giving it greater visibility. Are we then to eschew their use altogether? Whereas the VAW discussion shows an indicator process that is both internationally and institutionally collaborative, Merry’s next case—concerning measures of progress on human trafficking—is very much a hegemonic US project. Probably for this reason, she suggests, the indicators developed have proved very unsatisfying. These indicators present trafficking as a dyadic relation of trafficker and victim, rather than being the product of social relations and political/economic structures. That is, the indicators subordinate the complexity of people’s entry into sex work, replacing it with shortcuts that enable ranking states against one another. Merry’s fascinating chapter on human rights shows the remarkable complexity of the indicators developed so as to rank states on their compliance. A total of fifty-three indicators measure a “right to health,” eleven measure structural factors, thirty-two cover “process,” and ten measure outcomes. The attempt to implement them, however, revealed difficulties in deciding which were which. Merry finds that these indicators were imported from economic development and public health—that is, not a legal but a development framework—so as to make human rights concerns more understandable to the development community. Therefore, the entire process of making these indicators was biased toward a particular group of end users so as to recruit them into the categories employed. Another captivating discussion concerns the idea of commensuration: how the categories of social life are made commensurable across contexts. Concerning violence against women, for example, it turns out to be easier to make and compare lists of violent acts (punching, shooting) than to try to get at the victim’s experience (loss of dignity, violated sense of self, fear), which indicator builders regard as too hard to measure. If the constructed categories are to be commensurable, these must be left out. That is, the indicator creators, rather than those who suffer from trafficking, are the ones who decide which acts are more severe. Indeed, the 270 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 emphasis on commensurability can nullify the effort expended on comparing cases. In conclusion, Merry underscores that the theories standing behind the indicators assign responsibility for problems to individuals or states rather than to structural or systemic factors. The politics of indicator making are visible in decisions about what to count, how categories are constructed, whose expertise is drawn on (largely that of the Global North), the failure to include local knowledge or victims’ experience, and so on. Indicators, she contends, “provide a way to know a world that is unknowable and to govern a world that is ungovernable” (p. 139). Therefore, we must insist on including not just quantitative knowledge but also qualitative, ethnographic knowledge—of the categories enshrined in the numbers, of people’s experiences (say, of domestic violence), and of their practices. Her final sentence: “We rely on numbers alone at our peril” (p. 222). The idea that numbers lie is, of course, not new. As she writes, “Those who create indicators aspire to measure the world but actually create the world they’re measuring.” What this book does is show exactly how numbers lie, and it does so in disciplined, clear prose, supported by extended ethnography. In this sense, the book teaches an important form of literacy. If she returns to this subject, she might further expand on the notion of global governance and its relationship to the capitalist elites currently active in transforming governance altogether. I would like to end on a more personal note. With her numerous books, papers, edited collections, and remarkably extensive professional service, Sally Merry is a treasure of our discipline, who amply merits recognition. She has devoted copious amounts of time and energy to maintaining and improving our organizations and to carrying out research that truly matters, such as this book. It should be required reading for any course on research practice, or any person who thinks of using numbers, or anyone who reads in that vast literature (especially in the policy arena) that relies on quantitative indicators. Read it: You’ll never think about them the same way again. Response Anthropology and the Perils of Quantification DOI: 10.1111/aman.13178 Sally Engle Merry New York University Like many anthropologists, I am always asking myself what anthropology can contribute to making a better world. I have watched with despair as the social sciences have become ever-more quantitative, while ethnographic knowledge is described as “anecdotal” and less important. The conceit that we can know the world better if we count it is only growing, and the advent of big data and its huge increase in what Ian Hacking (1990) has called the “avalanche of numbers” is only adding to this idea. I wrote this book to push back against this movement, to insist that the detailed and microlevel analysis of social situations, relationships, and contexts provides invaluable insight into the world, and more specifically into relations of power. Ethnography provides an essential source of knowledge that quantification is unable to grasp. Numbers can help us see how widespread are the situations that we study ethnographically, and they are important in developing social issues and social movements. Numbers are also fundamental to modern governance. But their limits are too rarely addressed and recognized, as is the damage caused by the misleading picture they draw of social life. Under these conditions, ethnographic accounts are evermore important in providing a counterpoint to a quantified picture of social life. Since publishing this book, I have found sympathetic responses to this argument in many different disciplines and discovered a growing number of scholars joining in the critique of governing by numbers from fields as diverse as economics, political science, and philosophy. I was even invited to speak at the World Bank as they considered redesigning their governance indicators. There is clearly a need for anthropologists to continue the campaign to qualify numbers. This set of comments and responses to The Seductions of Quantification wonderfully expands and deepens the argument. We clearly have a lot of important work to do as anthropologists. In talks on this book, audiences constantly asked me: So, are some numbers better than others? How can we make better numbers? When I began this research, I was convinced that indicators needed to be eliminated in favor of qualitative work, but I came to see that there are ways that counting things provides an important antidote to discriminatory practices, prejudice, and failure to recognize important social issues. Moreover, it was clear to me that quantification as a dimension of governance is here to stay. So, I turned to the idea of indicator literacy: encouraging more skepticism about what can be learned from quantification and its limitations. In her commentary, Katherine Verdery does an excellent job of articulating this position and showing its importance for how we see and govern the world. I am deeply appreciative of her astute reading of the book and her assertion of its value. Although I have given many talks on this topic, writing a book is in the end an isolated Book Reviews experience, and it is very comforting to know it has provided some insights that are valuable. I also appreciate her recognition that a scholarly life involves many other activities, such as mentoring students, working with professional organizations, and building a field. I have found all of these activities rewarding and opportunities to learn more from students and colleagues. In her commentary, Diane Nelson suggests we need critique of this kind, but we also need to untangle the way the turn to quantification is connected to racialized, gendered inequalities rooted in imperialism and the historical transformations of capitalism and labor. In her recent book, she offers an analysis of how the historical turn to quantification is rooted in the increasing role of the individual in social life, the penchant for ordering and number in economic transactions, the growth of science, and the development of capitalism (Nelson 2015). She argues that the growth of a particular kind of numerical knowledge, based on Western ideas of number, is fundamental to the imperial, capitalist world we inhabit, and buttresses racialized and gendered inequalities as, over time, numerical knowledge has become masculinized and qualitative knowledge feminized. Clearly, articulating the relationship between qualitative and quantitative knowledge is essential. But, as Nelson notes, qualitative knowledge is also an abstraction and representation. Qualitative work, even ethnography, is largely a project of the Global North seeking to understand the Global South. Qualitative and quantitative accounts are not distinct forms of knowledge but are already deeply intertwined through similar processes of restricting the subject, importing social theory, and working with a commitment to a scientific notion of representing the world accurately. Nelson suggests that instead of viewing the problem as either/or, we see these forms of knowledge as mutually constituted. Indeed, my book shows how the construction of indicators is a deeply social and political process, shaped by the worlds of expert group meetings, statistical knowledge and technique, United Nations ideas of action, conceptions of accountability in governance, and Global North/South power relations, to name only a few of the surrounding social and cultural factors. Intriguingly, I received Nayanika Mathur’s contribution, framed by her frustration with the REF-indicator project in British academia, on the same day I received a preprint of an article critically reviewing my book. It was written by two human rights practitioners and is now published in a law review (Bello y Villarino and Vijeyarasa 2018). While Mathur wonders why I didn’t simply say that indicators are inherently destructive, as she sees them to be for British universities, the law review article claimed that I was far too critical of human rights indicators. The authors argue that these indicators are intended to hold states accountable for their human rights violations. Moreover, because universalism and homogenization are fundamental dimensions of human rights themselves, criticizing human rights indicators for the same traits seems unfair. Moreover, they complain that I failed to distinguish between good and bad indicators. 271 These reactions show how important indicators are to particular political projects. It is clear they are recognized as ways to exercise power, either to promote more scholarly “excellence,” as in Britain, or to increase human rights compliance. There is clearly a difference between the view of indicators by those who are using them and those who are being used or measured. The beleaguered British faculty feel overwhelmed by having to account for everything they do, while the beleaguered human rights advocates feel overwhelmed by the difficulty of holding states accountable for their human rights violations. Mathur suggests moving to an analysis of good indicators or bad ones, or, more precisely, to examining the effects of indicators. But it is very hard to know the effects of indicators. Some indicators are used for decision making, where it is easier to see what difference they make, while others simply influence public opinion. As an example of decisionmaking indicators, the Trafficking in Persons Reports by the US State Department determine the application of sanctions by the US government, while the REF in Britain determines university funding, as I understand it. But most indicators, even those with direct impact on decisions, act through far broader processes of knowledge production. This is very hard to measure or even to know ethnographically. Some indicator producers collect examples of changes governments make on the basis of their indicators, such as the World Justice Project’s list of countries that improved their rule of law in response to their measures. The World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report claims it has pressured some governments to change their modes of economic activity (Davis and Kruse 2007). How these indicators shape general public ideas about which universities are good, which countries have a strong rule of law, and which countries support human rights is far harder to find out. Assessing the full range of effects and deciding which indicators are constructive for particular ends and which ones are not is very hard. Some are clearly better representations of the world than others and more carefully drawn. But all efface difference, lump different things together, and express an underlying political agenda. Denise Brennan’s (2014) sensitive ethnographic account of trafficking exemplifies the approach that I think is needed to counteract the wash of misinformation, generalization, and crisis talk that galvanizes the antitrafficking movement and has produced wildly divergent numbers. As she suggests, if trafficking victims had been consulted in the processes of data collection and measurement, a far better set of numbers might have been produced. One aspect of better numbers is careful disaggregation of forms of exploited and unfree labor—separating exploited labor, coerced sex workers, forced-marriage brides, debt-bondage workers, and stateimposed forced laborers, to name a few categories. Instead, we have vast numbers of trafficked victims and modern-day slaves all lumped together. Clearly, these bold, aggregated numbers are more dramatic and attention grabbing than a detailed breakdown of 272 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 kinds of unfree labor. They are a clarion call for saving victims, positioning the rescuer in the powerful role of savior. They are also less expensive to collect because they involve simply combining estimates for each of these distinct violations, all of which are hard to define and count. They provide a far more attractive way for members of rich countries to conceptualize the problem of trafficking (including forced labor) than more structural analyses of capitalism and global inequality, which point to the complicity of rich countries and populations. To confront the problem of exploited labor, we need more ethnography and more disaggregated and thoughtful numbers, but the politics of trafficking and the funds to support it seem to be pushing in the opposite direction. Andrea Ballestero makes an excellent point that the failure of indicators to provide contextual, historical, and complicated accounts of social life does not lead to the elimination of indicators but rather to an escalation of effort: demands for more staff, more resources, more programs for measuring and counting. Yet, as she points out and shows in her own work, all numbers or numerical devices are modes of representation and translations of social life into other forms. Whether one examines a device, such as a formula for calculating the price of water in Costa Rica (Ballestero 2015), or the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are currently shaping international development efforts, numbers are inevitably translations and flawed representations. The difficulty of measuring the broad and aspirational goals of the SDGs, such as access to justice for all, reducing inequality within and among countries, and providing decent work for all, has generated a call to expand the measurement apparatus itself. The inevitable failure to accurately measure these goals will probably be blamed on a lack of resources rather than the conceptual impossibility of accurate measurement. Meanwhile, the effort to promote these admirable goals may well flounder given their immeasurability. More concrete and less ambitious goals will likely draw all the attention. I am very honored by all these thoughtful and insightful commentaries about my book and hope anthropologists will continue to use the discipline’s formidable ethnographic skills to challenge the dominance of the numerical in our contemporary world. REFERENCES CITED Ballestero, Andrea. 2015. “The Ethics of a Formula: Calculating a Financial–Humanitarian Price for Water.” American Ethnologist 42 (2): 262–78. Bello y Villarino, Jose-Miguel, and Ramona Vijeyarasa. 2018. “The Indicator Fad: How Quantifiable Measurement Can Work Hand-in-Hand with Human Rights—A Response to Sally Engle Merry’s The Seductions of Quantification.” International Law and Politics 50 (3): 985–1020. Brennan, Denise. 2014. Life, Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davis, Kevin E., and Michael B. Kruse. 2007. “Taking the Measure of Law: The Case of the Doing Business Project.” Law & Social Inquiry 32 (4): 1095–119. Hacking, Ian. 1990. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Diane. 2015. Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Single Reviews (reviewer in parentheses) Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World by Crystal Biruk Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 277 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13164 Noémi Tousignant University College London In this book’s title and opening vignettes, the “cooking” of data suggests an illicit act: a conjuring of facts without regard or respect for truth. This is somewhat misleading, given that the focus of Biruk’s ethnography of AIDS-related household surveys in Malawi is on the making of “clean” data. That is, Biruk focuses on the accepted, albeit not always prescribed and acknowledged, processes and practices—imaginative, material, and relational—by which people’s lives are converted into numbers and evidence. In this approach, all data—good and bad, clean or tainted—are always already “cooked.” Cooking begins at conception, for “data need to be imagined as data to exist” (p. 44). Even after the survey, once numbers have been sourced, coded, entered, “crunched,” and released, data are still cooked because they “continue to undergo transformations and critical evaluation” (p. 170). The book is ordered along this birth-to-afterlife course. Its first chapter takes us into the (field) office, as survey questionnaires are finalized by foreign and Malawian researchers. Its last chapter follows data into debates about the evidence on which HIV policy should be based. Three middle chapters are about fieldwork and fieldworkers, spotlighting the people, expertise, transactions, exertions, Book Reviews things, and concessions without which good(-enough) data could not be made and yet which are often erased from its presentations. Along the way, this ethnography demonstrates how not only data but also sites (the field, the household), subjects (the fieldworker, the research subject, described as “not fixed or pre-existing actors but as emergent workable forms that . . . are assembled in research words [p. 102]), and forms of expertise (i.e., “local knowledge”) are brought into being by and for data practices, the practical exigencies of surveys, and their epistemological dreams. For example, chapter 2 explores how local knowledge is neither stable nor possessed but is “a set of techniques and self-presentations, a habitus” (p. 83) that fieldworkers acquire and perform through their engagements with data. Indeed, this book’s main strength is its finely textured and thoughtful account of how “data and their social worlds [are] coproduced” (p. 6). In directing its observations at the (social) life of data—the relations, work, and infrastructures that bring data into being—rather than looking “behind” data (for what they fail to capture), or further up—and downstream to the politics of the demand for and “consumption” of numbers (though the last chapter makes a contribution to the latter by attending to the arbitration of evidence for evidence-based policy), Biruk makes an original contribution to the growing literature on quantification in Africa, development, and global health. Although not proclaimed as such, Cooking Data is, among other things, an ethnography of labor. Cooking—or, put less provocatively, “caring for” (p. 5)—data is hard work, and Biruk pays close attention to how this work is distributed, performed, credited, and rewarded (or not), as well as to what it generates: evidence and expertise but also claims, obligations, meaning, critique, and aspirations. This is addressed most explicitly in the introduction of chapters 2, 3, 273 and 4 as being about fieldworkers’ “largely invisible labor,” conceptualized by Biruk as knowledge work (p. 69). Yet chapter 1 is also attentive to how the imaginative work of foreign and Malawian researchers (the latter as “local collaborators”) orders and is unequally positioned within sociospatial and epistemological hierarchies. In chapter 3, Biruk describes a “discourse of labor” by which survey respondents describe their participation and critique the terms on which it is performed. The introduction makes an intriguing observation that I would have liked to see pushed further. Survey actors— investigators, fieldworkers, and subjects—are aware of gaps between, on the one hand, the compromises (epistemological, ethical, economic) by which data are made, and, on the other hand, its labeling as “clean.” Biruk explores how these actors live with/in this gap, thus sharing, to some extent, the ethnographer’s “critical gaze” (p. 17). In chapter 2, fieldworkers acknowledge survey work as precarious and underpaid but value it for the futures it allows them to imagine. Chapter 3’s wonderful analysis of soap-for-data transactions attends to how “cleanliness” depends on putting up with “mess,” such as the unequal and long-standing relations of exchange in which soap gets entangled. Yet, overall, I would have liked to read more about how, like soap, data have multiple and sometimes contested and competing meanings and qualities—at once stable and fragile, for example—and on how survey actors manage this coexistence, keeping these meanings apart or in tension in ways that likely vary according to circumstances and concerns. Perhaps a less linear structure, and an ethnography less tightly bound to data— freer to follow people as they move around and away from data and between its varied meanings—would have allowed for such exploration, ultimately obtaining an even richer account of the politics of cooking. The Importance of British Material Culture to the Historical Archaeologies of the Nineteenth Century edited by Alasdair Brooks Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and the Society for Historical Archaeology, 2015. 369 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13169 Michael Nevell University of Salford This collection of eleven edited papers, based on a session at the Society for Historical Archaeology’s 2010 conference in Florida, is a landmark in understanding the material culture of nineteenth-century Britain and its global impact. The collection provides a series of detailed case studies following British material culture from its localized manufacture to global use and then disposal or reuse. The dominance of nineteenth-century British trading networks and colonial power means that British material culture, typically but not exclusively ceramics, glass, and metal objects, can be found in abundance beyond the narrow confines of contemporary British rule. It is therefore appropriate that authors discuss research from Australia, Britain, Holland, and the United States of America. In terms of industrial production, Chris Jarret, Morag Cross, and Alistair Robertson look at the results of an excavation on the site of the late nineteenth-century Caledonian Pottery at Rutherglen in Glasgow. Analysis of wasters from a large dump to the east of the factory enabled the 274 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 characterization of its fabrics (blackware, whiteware, porcelain, stoneware, and Rockingham-type ware) and products (bowls, chemical wares, dishes, jugs, stoppers, tankards, teapot, and teacups), most of which were exported internationally. It was also possible to develop a typology of molded marks on jars for W. P. Hartley, a later owner of the site. Jennifer Basford looks at the branding of stoneware bottles manufactured in Britain in the period 1812–1834 in response to the imposition of excise duty on earthenware bottles. Using examples excavated from Hungate in York, she notes that products manufactured for export were stamped with the letters “EX,” while bottles intended for the blacking industry fell outside the remit of the excise and so were stamped “Blacking Bottle,” providing a useful dating aide. The distribution of these mass-produced objects is discussed in several chapters. Alasdair Brooks, Aileen Connor, and Rachel Clarke review a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century finds assemblage from Huntingdon town center in Britain, looking at international contacts. They focused their research on post-1750 refined white-bodied earthenwares and their decorative techniques. In particular, they use the evidence recovered to discuss divergences in the consumption of different decorative styles between British and overseas markets. Taking up this theme, Penny Crook contrasts domestic artifact assemblages from London and Sydney in the nineteenth century. She notes the close similarities between the two cities in terms of source, pottery styles, and quality in the assemblages excavated. Broader consumer studies are looked at in two chapters touching upon the role of food as material culture. Annie Gray studies the material culture of elite dining practices, discussing issues of food preparation and diet in a domestic context using multidisciplinary approaches that include food history as well as artifact studies. Richard Thomas’s analysis of the wider archaeological evidence for food, from an assemblage from the Chapter House in Worcester Cathedral, is a good partner to this chapter. Com- bining zoological evidence (principally animal bones and shellfish) with documentary material, he was able to look at the role of food in reinforcing secular and religious relationships through a study of the age of animals and use of body parts relating to high-quality meat products. Three chapters deal with lesser-studied objects. Carolyn White looks at the changing fashion for hair curlers, and Ralph Mills studies miniature objects from excavations in Britain and how these reflect class, consumption, and the spread of intellectual ideas. Finally, Harold Mytum looks at consumer choice in mortuary practices. He reviews coffin designs and fittings as well as commemorative memorial in graveyards, looking at the impact of artistic and architectural styles current in the nineteenth century. All three of these studies show how the biographies of these artifacts are as important as more traditional archaeological material, such as ceramics and animal bone. The introductory and concluding chapters discuss the current state and theoretical framework of nineteenthcentury British material studies. Alasdair Brooks provides an excellent overview of current archaeological approaches, both within and beyond Britain. He welcomes the plurality of approaches to the study of “ordinary household domestic material culture” in the volume. James Symonds highlights the role of the “mundane materiality of day-to-day life” as a democratizing counterweight to more elite studies of the period. Archaeological analysis of nineteenth-century British material culture has tended to focus on just one of three features—increasing specialization, mass production, and consumption—seldom acknowledging that the artifacts of the period involve all three aspects. This has meant that archaeological studies of the material culture of the period often suffer from being fragmentary or narrow in focus. A great strength of this work is that it includes case studies from production to consumption. This allows linkages to be made among the research approaches of industrial, postmedieval, and historical archaeologists and those in allied subject areas. Words of Passage: National Longing and Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants by Hilary Parsons Dick Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. 283 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13159 Marjorie Faulstich Orellana University of California, Los Angeles Words of Passage: National Longing and Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants, by Hilary Parsons Dick, offers a “thick” and thoughtful analysis of discourses about Mexican migration from the perspective of nonmigrants. Based on fieldwork and ethnographic interviewing in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and Uriangato, Mexico (a rancho/small town in the central state of Guanajuato), Dick analyzes talk about migration by those who “stayed behind.” Connecting, as well, to larger circulating discourses—for example, Book Reviews political speeches revealing “state-endorsed imaginaries of moral mobility” (p. 75)—she considers how ideas about migration have been central to nation-building and the production of inequality within Mexico: how migration shapes nonmigratory processes, especially for working-class Mexicans. This is not a book about contemporary migration or even about contemporary discourses about migration in Mexico. As she makes clear in her introduction, Dick’s fieldwork was conducted almost twenty years ago, in a significantly different sociopolitical era: before the rise of drug cartels, the US or global economic downturn, and the scaling up of deportations from the US under the presidency of George W. Bush (which deeply intensified under Obama and now Trump). The bulk of the ethnography was done between 2000 and 2002, with two follow-up visits in 2003 and 2005 (and two earlier visits in 1997 and 1999). Dick notes that the dangers of the drug wars have kept her from returning to Uriangato. The book captures a particular period of time in this Mexican rancho area as well as in Dick’s own life. Indeed, Dick situates herself actively in her fieldwork, using her racialized/gendered presence as a young, single, solo-traveling gringa to elicit local ideologies about “proper womanhood” as well as moral imaginaries of life in the United States. In doing so, she goes beyond many ethnographers’ rather surface-level reflections on their own positionalities, instead using her embodied presence as an ethnographic tool. She gives considerable attention to the pressure she felt to display herself as a “good girl” in order to counter negative stereotypes about loose American women. In this theorizing around gender, respectability, and family values, I found myself wanting to caution the reader about the dangers of the “ethnographic present.” Like the discourses Dick examines around migration and nationbuilding, these ideas were circulating some twenty years ago, and they surely have changed in that time, given social media and return or circulating migration, as well as shifting sociohistorical conditions. This does not diminish the value of the analyses Dick conducts; it’s just a call for researchers to examine how and in what ways those discourses and their attendant practices may differ now. While Dick is very clear about what this book is not, and the constraints she faced in gathering data, I found it a little 275 more difficult to identify just what it is. Various possibilities are offered: “an ethnography of the imagined lives of Mexican migrants” (p. 5); a “multi-sited ethnography” examining “interconnections between the present and various historical, imaginative, and geographical ‘beyonds’” (p. v); or a “close textual analysis of discourse as interaction” (p. xxii), using interview data to probe “meta-discursive rationalization” (p. xxv), interwoven with ethnographic analyses of other semiotic practices (e.g., home building and the Catholic cult of saints). Focusing mostly on close analyses of talk and text, the book still offers some sense of the material realities of life in Uriangato at the time, but readers who want more of the ethnographic details should jump from the opening vignettes to the second half of the book. Dick is a linguistic ethnographer by training, and her strengths lie in the analyses of text and talk. She did not have access to the coin of the realm of linguistic anthropology (everyday talk) because she was unable to secure permission to record beyond interviews, a fact that she recognizes was “alarming” to her linguistic sensibilities. Nevertheless, she suggests the power of interview data for revealing how people rationalize their beliefs, and she deploys her skills to consider these data as few interviewers do—for example, by gendered patterns of pronoun use. She also reflects meta-cognitively on her own “words of passage” as an interviewer at a time when she was quite young and still learning to be an “expert.” Whatever we may call it, the book is an impressive tome, seemingly having distilled and matured in the twenty years since the fieldwork was begun. It is theoretically dense, using both top-down and grounded theorizing, and is strongly anchored in relevant literature. Dick’s impressive bibliography brings migration studies into dialogue with discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. She shows the power of words to shape material lives, giving rare attention to constructions of difference among Mexicans along dimensions of class, gender, and migration trajectories. It is a “heady” book—perhaps appropriate given the title. While some of the discourses the book unpacks do seem to be words of passage, the power of Dick’s work lies in having captured them in their historical and social context, creating a roadmap for contemporary researchers to examine new discourses that circulate now. White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing by Susan Falls Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. 270 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13166 Kristin Wilson Cabrillo College Informal breast-milk sharing is an increasingly widespread phenomenon in North America, aided by the Internet but still distinctly local in its practice. White Gold digs into a “counternetwork” of gift giving and gift receiving among mothers in a Southern US city and its environs. This new community is “powered by a politics of pragmatics” (p. 202) that selectively borrows from existing frameworks of motherhood, science, and capitalism. Falls writes, “Milk sharing is not a rejection or dismissal of science or 276 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 technology but rather a calculated, embodied engagement with it” (p. 150). Falls’s account of her own bodily engagement as a mother procuring human milk for her adoptive infants carries the reader deep into the emotional and material dimensions of the practice. As she discovers the tacit rules of milk sharing—buying or selling milk is verboten, for example— we get to see her grapple with the layered and contested meanings of “white gold” as a precious and not-yet-fullycommodified substance that is also daily food for her children. The perspectives of medical providers act as both foil and support for the milk-sharing participants. These mothers invest in the “breast is best” ideal promoted by many of their providers and backed by official bodies like the World Health Organization and yet take a dubious view of conservative public health worries about the milk’s safety (a discourse that distrusts mothers). The milk sharers’ aims and “instincts” as highly committed mothers take precedence, and their new motley village (from hippie donors to educated yuppie gogetters to church-going, working-class, stay-at-home moms) promotes and protects this maternalism. But, as Falls states, “It’s unremarkable to back-engineer agency on the part of milk sharers: I assume they, like me, have subjectivities and that those subjectivities, like mine, include intentions (or at least what feels like intentionality) that seem to motivate various (apparently) goal-oriented actions” (p. 173). She notes that a glass of cow’s milk on the kitchen table is unlikely to unleash ruminations about subjectivity and ideology and agency and consciousness. The powerful meaning-making around pumped-and-portable breast milk and milk sharing is anchored by mundane “want and surplus” (p. 90). Falls’s work avoids the trap of neatly summarized descriptions and instead allows for the nuance and contradictions of real life. Her arguments are compelling and firmly grounded in historical context and contemporary debates on breastfeeding in North America, the stories of her interlocutors, and the actions she observes and in which she participates. Are the milk sharers enacting a “mode of dissent” (p. 89) against commercial interests like infant formula, or are they taking an informed approach to feeding their babies given the data on the nutrition of breast milk? Are they experiencing a life adventure and delighting in community building? (Conforming to Southern norms of “visiting,” the donors and recipients in Falls’s network spend significant time performing the appropriate social niceties during milk exchanges.) Or, in the case of milk recipients, are they feeling somewhat desperate, like failures as mothers because they cannot produce enough milk to feed their own babies? The detailed accounts in this ethnography make it clear that all of these narratives are valid representations of the milk-sharing experience. The real genius of this singular ethnography, though, is Falls’s invitation to the reader to exercise their imaginations. With thirty-one illustrations that include art images, ad posters, and even the author’s own sketches and photographs, Falls makes space in her exposition for thoughtful pauses. Between research chapters, she presents slices of art history, architectural theory, and film criticism that engage with breastfeeding and milk-sharing themes. She means these to inspire “oblique engagements” that will infuse feelings into the rational arguments she constructs. It is an exercise that helps the reader recognize the emotional textures interwoven into the practical work of producing, pumping, freezing, shipping, and offering human milk. The transitory quality of infancy and the short-term need for the milk-sharing counternetwork (which arguably has an enduring impact on individual lives) make for a riveting example of how need-based, politically charged movements can arise. A provocative, transportable theory of “free spaces,” inspired by the architecture of Lebbeus Woods, intersects with the intimate stories of White Gold. These free spaces, not unlike the book’s vignettes, allow for discovery and contemplation. Woods’s design includes unprescribed gaps that are “discovered by chance or only by those who are looking for them” (p. 198). Similarly, breast-milk sharing and its subterranean counternetwork are discovered fortuitously by the participants who make their own meaning of it. This “sweet spot between the visible and invisible, in which large numbers of participants creatively negotiate alternative relationships” (p. 200) surely exists in other emergent communities that also benefit from “quiet encroachment” on official structures and hegemonic ideologies. Falls suggests, correctly, I think, that these interstices offer a way to imagine different futures. Book Reviews 277 Archaeology and Identity on the Pacific Coast and Southern Highlands of Mesoamerica edited by Claudia Garcı́a-Des Lauriers and Michael W. Love Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. 226 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13173 Jeffrey P. Blomster George Washington University Identity construction permeates all modes of social action. It is a particularly salient issue on the Pacific Coast and southern highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala due to the coastal route’s enduring importance for trade and resulting influx of people, materials, and ideas—and, as the editors suggest, new identities shaped by this interaction. In ten brief chapters, ranging from the Middle Archaic to Postcolonial periods, and informed by a diverse range of theories, most explicitly evolutionary psychology, practice theory, and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), participants contribute identity-focused studies that will resonate in scholarship beyond this region. The editors provide a substantive introduction that contextualizes identity, which they view as most usefully conceived as fluid and situational. Their emphasis is on the contexts in which identity construction is performed, negotiated, and contested; they characterize previous research as overly focused on ethnic and linguistic identity. While identity is most often explored through public spheres, they favor the domestic spaces where gender, status, and cultural identity are negotiated and replicated in everyday practice, which they link to habitus and embodiment of identity. Hector Neff considers identity construction through the lens of costly signaling theory, in which the “wasteful” practice of identity construction must have some fitness payoff, which Neff links with the origins of prestige and increased reproductive benefits. Less about identity and agency than psychological predispositions that drive humans to attain the maximum prestige possible given local conditions, Neff takes readers on a whirlwind tour of prestige advertising from the Archaic to the Terminal Classic. Two other chapters encompass large spans of time. Lucia R. Henderson argues that the paired loci of Lake Amatitlán and Volcán Pacaya formed an enduring pilgrimage location that fostered identity construction for pilgrims. From Middle Formative to Colonial times, these paired landscape features, probably associated with the juncture of the three vertical levels of the Mesoamerican cosmos, drew pilgrims whose offerings, mostly lacking archaeological context, have been dredged up from the lake. While ceramics invoke foreign styles, they appear to have been produced locally, perhaps obtained by pilgrims at an associated marketplace. While Henderson convincingly demonstrates the importance of the landscape and pilgrimage to identity construction, identity may be less tied to this specific place than the entire pilgrim experience. Janine Gasco examines the impact of linguistic patterns and changes in material culture on identity shifts from the late fifteenth to early twentieth century in Soconusco. The trade and influx of outsiders led to a multiplicity of ethnolinguistic backgrounds; Gasco argues these multilingual indigenous people responded by speaking Nahuatl as a lingua franca, which was replaced in the twentieth century by Spanish. She concludes that people coped with this heterogeneity by becoming more like each other; the impact on material culture remains unknown. Michael W. Love explores identity constructions and negotiations at La Blanca, which he persuasively argues was an urban center from 900 to 600 BC. Cities were places where new identities were formed at multiple levels of society; the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces, as well as innovative practices and enduring structures, underscored the inclusion and exclusion in daily action that was fundamental in the structuration of identity. In the formation of a community identity at La Blanca, rituals instilled both a sense of groupness while also reinforcing ranking and exclusion. Similar themes of inclusion and differentiation are expressed in two chapters that move forward in time to the Classic, when Teotihuacan enters the picture. Claudia Garcı́a-Des Lauriers examines the role of architecture at Los Horcones in forming a space that structured the performances of rituals and identity. She contrasts the six ballcourts at the site, interpreted as arenas for more heterodox and local identity discourses, with Group F, where elites created a “Teotihuacan identity” by citing that great Mexican city through spatial organization of architecture. Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos interprets sculpture from Cotzumalhuapa as reflecting elite identity by how they chose to both represent and differentiate themselves from competing groups. The imagery, he argues, shows the elites citing ancient, local roots while rejecting the kind of Teotihuacan identity on display at the competing center of Montana. Central Mexican groups also play a role in two chapters that employ ethnohistory and ethnography to explore identity formation during the Postclassic, primarily of the K’iche’ Maya. Rudd van Akkeren sees “Mexican” influence arriving through mercantile activity and guilds. He argues for the chinamit (lineage clusters) as most important in an identity that 278 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 crossed ethnic and linguistic boundaries; each lineage within the chinamit was materialized as a longhouse on a plaza. In contrast, Geoffrey E. Braswell sees the K’iche’ as more of a confederation, united by military and economic domination. Much of Braswell’s chapter is an idiosyncratic polemic on archaeological theory, with provocative assertions that both intrigue and frustrate, as many are unsupported or lack citations. Practice theorists, for example, are charged with employing habitus to understand ethnicity, related to the essential qualities of the individual, while he characterizes ethnicity as only existing in states (contradicted by examples in this volume). Braswell deploys ANT to explore K’iche’ paradoxes through three concepts: cultural totems, House society, and differences among legitimizing, resistance, and program identity. More attention to the K’iche’ case study, as well as more explicit deployment of ANT, would be useful. From his perch as discussant, John E. Clark critiques the chapters, raising useful questions and introducing additional concepts. Beyond looking at past persons as constructed agents, he urges researchers to imagine them in Mesoamerican lifeworlds of their own making, challenging ANT’s perspective that agency only emerges through interaction; he argues instead that Mesoamerican phenomenology grants things agency independent of humans. Clark also eschews overly Durkheimian views on public ritual as promoting social cohesion; instead, he argues, rituals are a tool of alterity, and we should be more focused on what kinds of identity they affect. Clark’s chapter is engaging and challenging, inspiring future research into this important topic. Transforming the Dead: Culturally Modified Bone in the Prehistoric Midwest edited by Eve A. Hargrave, Shirley J. Schermer, Kristin M. Hedman, and Robin M. Lillie Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2015. 369 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13168 Mallorie A. Hatch Arizona State University In Transforming the Dead, artificially modified human bones are taken out of site-report appendices and brought to the forefront of bioarchaeological investigation. The studies in this volume are critical for reconstructing how death and the afterlife were viewed and experienced by precontact peoples of the US Midwest. But, moreover, this volume recognizes that modified bone objects were imbued with lifecycles of their own, perhaps linked to the person they were from, or perhaps not. Their life as artifacts mirrored that of humans—creation, use, and termination into interment or repurposing. The contributors to this volume stress that an academic reluctance to engage deeply with Native American belief systems has resulted in de facto interpretations of isolated modified remains as ritual items or war trophies. Western dualistic concepts of peace during the Middle Woodland and war throughout the Late Prehistoric period have guided these scholarly interpretations. Such overarching theories have led researchers to ascribe human bone objects with politically and ritually charged meanings that may not be concordant with emic understandings. Hargrave and colleagues challenge readers to conceptualize these objects beyond such etic anthropological understandings, pushing them toward more holistic approaches. The volume is divided into four sections focused on cultural groups. Section 1 examines modified human bones from Woodland cultures, particularly those dating to the Middle Woodland (ca. 200 BC–AD 500). Successfully demonstrating the variety of analytical approaches that may be used to investigate the past, three contributions explore the distribution and possible uses of Middle Woodland artificially modified jaws. Nawrocki and Emanovsky employ a forensic taphonomic approach for reconstructing the manufacture and use of these jaws, while Cobb views these artifacts as intrinsically tied to their temporal and regional contexts. Johnston tests hypotheses about modified human jaws as trophies, revered ancestors, or memento mori using a scientific framework. Weaving together taphonomic and theoretical approaches, Carr and Novotny interpret Scioto Hopewell mortuary practices as ritual dramas intended to foster collective identities. Lee and Johnston document phallic batons shaped from human bone from Ohio Hopewell contexts. The section concludes with Schermer and Lillie’s work on the life history of drilled and excised human bone from Iowa. Uses of human bone artifacts recovered from Mississippian (ca. AD 1050–1700) contexts are included in section 2. Hargrave and Cook explore the “object biographies” of modified human long bones recovered from Submound 51 at Cahokia, adding insights from experiments to re-create the polished edges seen on one of the recovered modified human femurs. Zejdlik’s contribution corrects an interpretation of a modified human tibia from the Aztalan site in Wisconsin as an elk-antler dagger. Through a rich Book Reviews discussion of Eastern Woodlands symbolism, Cook and Munson explore cultural use of a rattle composed from human cranial bone recovered from the Angel site. The Mississippian section closes with Munson and colleagues’ examination of human bone modified into display objects from Caborn-Welborn sites near the mouth of the Wabash River. Section 3 is comparatively brief, presenting chapters on incised and etched remains dating to the Late Prehistoric period (ca. AD 1100–1700) of Upper Mississippian cultures. Hedman contrasts modified human skeletal remains from mortuary and nonmortuary contexts from two sites in northeastern Illinois. Blue highlights the importance of modified and suspended human teeth as reflections of group identity, and Lillie and Schermer explore the similarities between incised human bone and those on pottery, petroglyphs, and other portable objects from Oneota sites in Iowa. The final section, titled “Perspectives,” contains two standout chapters of interest to a nonspecialist reader. Sundstrom problematizes axiomatic interpretations of scalptaking as war trophies, pushing for an understanding of scalping as a practice rooted in cultural symbolism and ceremony. Smith concludes by artfully weaving together archaeological theory and Native American worldviews to provide theoretical context to the volume’s contributions. 279 While contributors apply insights from the bioarchaeology, archaeology, and ethnography of the Americas, the volume would benefit from engaging with theoretical ideas emanating from Europe. For example, Verdery’s (1999) work on the deceased human body as a political tool would provide a complementary perspective to several of the chapters. Additionally, although the editors call for inclusion of Native American voices in bioarchaeological interpretations, emic concepts were only derived from the ethnographic and ethnohistoric literature. This shortcoming is not a fault of the authors but rather a recognition that US Midcontinental bioarchaeology as a discipline is struggling to include presentday Native American voices in its research. Hargrave and colleagues’ volume presents a formidable first step for creating a repository of interpretations of artificially modified bone in the prehistoric Midwest. Subsequent studies are required to continue building on the authors’ findings, adding new geographies, documentation of deposition contexts, ethnographic insights, and cultural frameworks. Through this work, improved reconstructions of prehistoric Native American worldviews about death, society, and the body can be formed. REFERENCE CITED Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Polygamy and the Rise and Demise of the Aztec Empire by Ross Hassig Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. 186 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13167 Susan Toby Evans Penn State University The years 2019 through 2021 will mark the 500th anniversary of the takeover of the Aztec empire by Spain. This conquest’s abruptness echoes the relatively short duration of the Aztec empire itself. In the ninety years between Tenochtitlan’s independence from its overlords (about CE 1430) and Cortes’s arrival in 1519, the Aztecs created Mesoamerica’s greatest political construct, encompassing much of the territory of modern Mexico and provinces diverse in languages and cultural practices. The Aztec tributary empire spread Nahua culture as it demanded regular payments from an ever-increasing set of provinces. This channeled a tide of wealth toward the ruling dynasties. Tenochtitlan went from large village to city of legendary beauty, and its rulers oversaw radical stratification of the Aztec socioeconomic structure, leading to complicated customs of elite life, including polygyny as the preferred marriage pattern of the upper class. To explain this meteoric growth, Ross Hassig looks at polygyny’s effect on patterns of royal succession and mate choice, and the important role played by cohorts of royal offspring. His models of how these features interacted reflect the challenges shared by all scholars of the Aztecs: a shallow historical record marked by inconsistencies of many types and sizes. This both absolves scholars of uniformity as to specific dates, names, and circumstances, and condemns us to lavish qualifiers on every assertion. Our best knowledge suggests that Aztec rulers were chosen by a group of a dynastic family’s elders from a small number of appropriate candidates. The succession pattern seems to reflect situational responses to dramatic changes over the short life of the empire, as the territorial catchment zone funding the ruling families expanded along with the number of candidates. From the founder (1370s) to 280 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 Cuauhtemoc’s death in 1524, succession ran from father to son to son to uncle to nephew to grandson to brother to brother to nephew to brother to cousin. The set of three brothers (rulers 6, 7, and 8) conforms best to Hassig’s model that cohorts of dynastic siblings successively dominated the Aztec empire. This assumes that, over time, rulers sired children in numbers following a curve of a normal distribution. This pattern of sibships results from many factors regarding male and female fertility patterns in polygynous societies. Hassig reviews these but ignores an important one for the Aztecs: the years of marital abstinence that began early in a pregnancy and persisted for four years after the birth. This would strongly affect completed family size, even with many wives. Aztec polygyny had sociopolitical and economic functions. In noble marriages, the principal wife’s lineage was politically important and, ideally, more prestigious than that of her husband. As Tenochtitlan became more powerful, its noblewomen became the principal wives of ruling lords of other domains, offering scope for Tenochca political interference as well as for solidarity—the heir was typically the son of the principal wife, and Aztec bilateral kinship norms favored strong family ties on both sides (note: daughters occasionally inherited rule). To understand the impact of the noble class on the rest of society, one must estimate its size. Hassig assumes that nobles formed a small percentage of Tenochtitlan’s total population—perhaps 10 percent but probably even smaller. How many nobles lived in Tenochtitlan? Until very recently, Aztec scholars have proposed whopping population sizes for Tenochtitlan, even over half a million (Hassig uses 200,000 to 300,000). This garden city of 5.4 square miles held ritual precincts, plazas, causeways, canals, and single- story buildings—its monumental structures, like palaces, had different levels—but no fully constructed upper stories. If modern Manhattan, the most densely settled community in the modern United States, has fewer than 67,000 per square mile, then values of 200,000 and up are completely inappropriate for Tenochtitlan. In seeking the causes and the sustaining value of polygyny, Hassig does not address its economic value, the materialist basis for all other considerations. The vigorous Aztec mercantile economy used lengths of woven cloth as an established exchange medium: a polygynous family constituted a profitable workshop. The sixteenth-century chronicler Motolinı́a ([1541] 1951), trying to convert polygynous Aztec men to monogamous Christianity, described the difficulty of persuading them. The men pointed out that the Spaniards were hypocrites, that they had many female servants, and that Aztec wives served in this capacity and “also as a means of profit, because they set all the women weaving cloth, making mantles” (202). While some of Hassig’s insights are sound and thoughtprovoking, ignoring this essential motivating feature of polygyny is a serious lapse. He writes with authority about many issues, and his formulae attempt to impose order on the not-infrequent chaos of the ethnohistorical record, but without solid grounding in economic costs and benefits, his models cannot convincingly explain the rise and persistence of Aztec polygyny. REFERENCE CITED Motolinı́a (Fray Toribio de Benavente). (1541) 1951. History of the Indians of New Spain. Translated and edited by F. B. Steck. Washington, DC: Publications of the Academy of American Franciscan History. Disease and Discrimination: Poverty and Pestilence in Colonial Atlantic America by Dale L. Hutchinson Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. 249 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13172 Audrey Horning William and Mary What role did European diseases play in American colonial encounters? In this wide-ranging volume, bioarchaeologist Dale Hutchinson joins the conversation started by Alfred Crosby’s 1972 The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Hutchinson frames the study of diseases as “processes, not things,” which “exist within an ecological and social context” (p. xviii). The path that any given disease may take is as dependent upon economic, po- litical, and social factors as it is on biological composition or ecological conditions. Exploring an array of documented disease outbreaks, the author challenges popular perceptions about the spread of Crosby’s “virgin soil epidemics” through examining the conditions that both facilitated and hampered transmission. The book is organized into nine chapters in four unequal parts: “Of Apples and Edens” (chapters 1–3), “Natives and Newcomers” (chapters 4–6), “Planters and Pestilence” (chapters 7–8), and “Measuring the Lands” (chapter 9 and epilogue). Part 1 provides overviews of disease transmission, the framework of historical epidemiology, and specific considerations of palaeopathology and the skeletal markers of Book Reviews diseases such as syphilis and tuberculosis. This latter section draws on Aleš Hrdlička’s tuberculosis research (pp. 35–40), surprisingly (for a work considering colonial legacies) without comment on Hrdlička’s controversial field practices and racist ideology (Blakey 1987). The remainder of the volume consists of a whirlwind tour of disease outbreaks. While the subtitle suggests chronological and geographical boundaries, the text traverses far and wide, from sixteenth-century Mesoamerica through the colonial settlements of Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth to the tenements of New York City and the global flu pandemic of 1918. The Iroquois and Cherokee make an appearance, as do enslaved peoples of the Carolinas and the Chesapeake, Mongol raiders, French fur traders, Dutch merchants, Famine-era Irish immigrants, and even the contemporary Yanomamo of Brazil. The many examples clearly illustrate the point about disease as process as they highlight the multiple factors that facilitated the spread of devastating diseases. But, inevitably, historical complexities get lost along the way. The intended audience is clearly nonspecialists and undergraduate students interested in the generalities of historical disease if not the nitty-gritty details of historical experience. The author’s informal prose style, even including an invocation of Forrest Gump and his box of chocolates (p. 104), will appeal and repel in equal measures. Those seeking an academic treatment of a critical topic in the study of colonial encounters will be frustrated by the lack of referencing. The complex processes of English, French, and Dutch expansion in seventeenth-century New England is summarized without citations (p. 50), while considerations of complicated cultural entanglements, such as that of the Huron with seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries (pp. 51–52), or the Jamestown colonists and the Powhatan paramount chiefdom (p. 111), rely on quotes from European narratives and one American history textbook (Taylor 2001) rather than drawing on current research, particularly work that engages with Indigenous perspectives (e.g., contributions in Schmidt and Mrozowski 2013). 281 The old adage of never letting the truth get in the way of a good story occasionally applies, as when Hutchinson (p. 135) recounts the discovery of three lead-coffin burials from the seventeenth-century brick chapel at St Mary’s City, Maryland: “In the fall of 1990, two archaeologists . . . found something hard in the ground where they were excavating— they thought it was a rock. It turned out to be the stone floor of a chapel. Beneath it were three lead coffins.” Entertaining, but pure fiction (I worked there in 1990). The project directors, Henry Miller and Tim Riordan, knew the difference between a rock and a hard place, having identified the burial vault through geophysical prospecting (Miller 1995). While Hutchinson (p. 11) acknowledges that his vignettes are “neither exhaustive nor completely factual representations,” the Maryland example left me doubting the veracity of his other tales. Overall, Disease and Discrimination achieves its aim of broadening examinations of disease and its impacts by knitting together consideration of biological factors with their cultural contexts. The volume is well illustrated, and there are a range of helpful tables. Those interested in debates over disease should certainly read this volume for its breadth and interpretive perspective, if not for its details. REFERENCES CITED Blakey, Michael. 1987. “Skull Doctors: Intrinsic Social and Political Bias in the History of American Physical Anthropology, with Special Reference to the Work of Aleš Hrdlička.” Critique of Anthropology 7 (2): 7–35. Crosby, Alfred. 1972. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. Miller, Henry. 1995. “Mystery of the Lead Coffins.” American History 30 (4): 46–53. Schmidt, Peter, and Stephen Mrozowski, eds. 2013. The Death of Prehistory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Alan. 2001. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. New York: Viking Books. Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea by Sarah Ives Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 255 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13163 Elizabeth Hull SOAS, University of London How are human–environment relations transforming in the wake of climate change? This is surely a central question of our time and one that Sarah Ives poses with urgency and insight in her book Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea. Drawing on ethnographic research among white Afrikaner and “colored” rooibos farmers in the Cederberg region of South Africa, Ives studies the political ecology of one unusual plant: rooibos. This plant grows in a small ecological zone called fynbos, found only in the 282 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 Western Cape. Set against South Africa’s volatile political history, the book shows how farmers avoid problematic claims to ethnic indigeneity or national belonging and instead build a connection to the region’s enduring ecological qualities and to rooibos tea itself. Climate change, however, threatens to shift the fynbos landscape southward. Ives uses Stefan Helmreich’s (2009) idea of “symbiopolitics” to conceptualize the relationships among people, place, and plant (p. 67). In Cederberg, these relationships are forged through the life-giving qualities of rooibos tea as a source of livelihood and as an item of daily consumption. Yet, despite the seductively simple idea of a symbiosis between people and ecosystem, the book tells a distressing story of how South Africa’s especially brutal history of racialized capitalism is playing out in the post-apartheid era. The region is characterized by long-standing patterns of unequal access to land, with class divisions falling glaringly along racial lines. Housing remains deeply racially segregated; unemployment, alcoholism, and violence are widespread. Most farms are owned by Afrikaners, while the local colored population competes with black South African and Zimbabwean migrants for poorly paid farm work. A minority of colored people have their own small farms or belong to a co-operative, often on church-owned land. These arrangements come with their own microstruggles over land and revenue, but they allow people to work independently from the larger commercial farms. Ives teases out interesting parallels between Afrikaners’ and colored farmers’ experiences of the social ecology they share. Afrikaners’ sense of indigeneity is located in a deep family history of rooibos farming. Viewing themselves as the stewards of this unique indigenous plant, their “formerly ‘European’ bodies became ‘indigenized’ through exertion in the rooibos soil” (p. 203). Ideals of a resourceful and rugged masculine body are mirrored in the plant’s own robustness, the master of its dry and dusty bushcovered landscape. The role and plight of the farmworkers they employ are conveniently blotted out of their narratives. The book provides only occasional insight into the perspectives of farmworkers, a limitation Ives acknowledges, and she explains their reluctance to participate in the research. The colored population can no more claim indigeneity on the grounds of ethnicity than can white farmers, Ives maintains. The “Khoisan” (sometimes known as San or, more problematically, “bushmen”) are recognized as the original autochthonous peoples, their descendants dispersed among the colored population. Yet long-standing racist narratives depict them as relics of the past, surviving only in cave paintings, a kind of extinct fauna of the natural environment. For colored people to claim Khoisan identity would render them uncivilized, even not-yet-human. Instead, like the Afrikaners, colored farmers forge their sense of belonging as protectors of rooibos. Yet this is based not on past doing but on intentionality, built around a future-oriented set of aspirations. Ives implies that there is little mileage in the appeal of Khoisan identity as a source of economic potential, given the derogatory, racialized associations this entails. However, the story becomes more complicated in the conclusion. In 2014, the Department of Environmental Affairs declared that the traditional knowledge for rooibos “rests with the communities who originate in these areas,” the Khoi and San. This study was commissioned following exhortation by the South African San Council, an organization aimed at defending the rights of the “first” indigenous peoples of Africa. Ives poses the questions that many residents were asking regarding the legal and financial implications of this statement for those with and without Khoisan indigeneity yet falls short of providing an answer. The example of hoodia, another indigenous plant of the area, which is valuable for its hunger-suppressing qualities, offers a revealing comparison. When the plant was patented in 1996, John and Jean Comaroff (2009) explain, it soon became the object of an intense struggle over intellectual property rights. The San Council was established in 2001 as a means to assert collective ethnic and legal identity, and had considerable success in the hoodia case. The Comaroffs concluded that “the San people, as ethno-corporation, is taking increasingly articulate shape” (p. 92; emphasis in original). Why did the council not pursue the rooibos case further? Why did the colored people in Ives’s account avoid identifying as San, while those in the Comaroffs’ case appear to embrace it? More is needed to connect the dots between these divergent accounts. Overall, Steeped in Heritage is a fascinating and well-written account that refreshingly avoids the dominant paradigms associated with climate change—those of “adaptation,” “vulnerability,” and “resistance.” Instead, it gives us a much-needed analysis of ecological change as a thoroughly social process, inseparable from local politics, which are dominated by structures of race and class. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary politics of southern Africa or the future of food in a time of ecological crisis. REFERENCES CITED Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Helmreich, Stefan. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Book Reviews 283 Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives by Pardis Mahdavi Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. 216 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13170 Bina Fernandez University of Melbourne, Victoria In Crossing the Gulf, Pardis Mahdavi presents a poignant and compelling analysis of the intimate lives of migrants in the Persian Gulf countries of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Drawing on richly layered, multisited global ethnographic research that spanned a decade, the heart of the book’s argument is that the emotional dimensions of migrants’ lives are deeply intertwined with their mobility and their immobility. The book introduces the key concept of “im/mobility” to articulate “immobility as a factor sutured with mobility in shaping both migration and the intimate lives of migrants” (p. 23). Through her examination of how migrants’ ties of love, family, kinship, and sexuality shape their decisions about mobility and immobility, Mahdavi offers a nuanced counter to the hegemonic state discourses on human trafficking and migrant labor regulation that tend to flatten migrant agency and identity, and assume migration as structurally determined. The analysis of the intimate lives of migrants also provides an important shift away from the emphasis in the scholarship on gendered migration on the intimate labor of migrants (Boris and Parrenas 2010). Thus, while some of Mahdavi’s interlocutors are engaged in forms of paid intimate labor (domestic work, childcare, sex work, etc.), for others, such labor may be unpaid and engaged in as part of the relationships and emotional bonds they have with children, family, partners, and, sometimes, employers. Central to the structure of the book are the narratives of migrant women who have children while they are working in the Gulf cities of Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai. The intersection of the kefala (migrant-sponsor) system with Zina laws (which criminalize sex outside marriage) subjects women to a “deportation regime tethered to their sexualities” (p. 45). Unmarried migrant women are prohibited from marrying or giving birth to children, and if they do, they and their children are thrust into a precarious, liminal status. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the stories of migrant women—from Nepal, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and the Philippines—who have had children as a result of either voluntary or forced sexual relationships. After giving birth, many of these women were forcibly separated and deported to their home countries without their children. Reflecting on their stories, Mahdavi juxtaposes the economic and so- cial mobility that migration generated for them and their families with the immobility (for them and their children) that resulted from the choices they made in intimate relationships. As she notes, the “bonds of love were often both mobilizing and immobilizing, for the migrants as well as their transnational families, sometimes at the same time” (p. 69). Chapter 3 outlines how inflexible economic-citizenship regimes and family ties in source countries compel migrants’ mobility. But it also shows how migrants with children become enmeshed in and constrained by the highly restrictive and rigid laws pertaining to family reunification and citizenship transfer to migrants in the Gulf countries. We learn of the plight of bidoun, or stateless children born to unmarried migrant mothers whose fathers are known. These children are denied the citizenship of their mother with no possibility of returning to her home country or of ever obtaining citizenship where they were born, even though it is the only country they have ever known. Mahdavi shows how migrants’ and their children’s responses are nevertheless flexible, finding room to creatively maneuver and survive within these constraints. Migrant flexibility is demonstrated again in chapter 4 with a closer look at the motivations of young migrants as they leave, and return, “home.” The chapter illustrates the complex subjectivities of women like Leela from India and Sylvie from Madagascar, who sought to escape marriage by migrating, and of Gabriella and Amina, who sought to escape motherhood. We also meet women for whom migration is an opportunity to explore their sexuality through dance, multiple partners, or lesbian relationships. Through these narratives, Mahdavi effectively unsettles our understanding about what constitutes “home” for these women and, in doing so, challenges the assumption within dominant antitrafficking discourse of a “home” to which “victims” of trafficking should be returned. In chapter 5, Mahdavi introduces the exceptional condition of children abandoned by their migrant mothers and whose fathers are unknown. These children are “adopted” by the emir and given a better life than their mothers would have been able to provide them. Yet this liminal status produces an ambiguous sense of belonging and uncertain futures as adults in the country of their birth. The final two chapters turn the analysis to the effects of migrant lives on state policies and vice versa. Mahdavi argues that attention to the narratives of the intimate lives of migrants has the potential to destabilize the dominant antitrafficking discourse. She suggests that 284 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 effective state responses would be less restrictive and punitive, and better acknowledge the autonomy and intimate lives of migrants. Notably, this book is moving in its honest and deeply personal reflections on Mahdavi’s own journey as a woman, mother, activist, and scholar whose life journey has intertwined with those of her interlocutors. An important shift in trajectory she documents is the modification of the position she took in her previous book (Mahdavi 2011), which viewed the antitrafficking framework as possibly beneficial, to her position in this book, which views it as producing more harm than good. Crossing the Gulf is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on migration, with vital policy implications, particularly regarding the situation of those women and their children who are “immobilized” by the laws and regulations in the Gulf countries. Mahdavi has achieved a commendable balance of providing an in-depth portrait of their lives without the polarizing discourse that demonizes their employers and host countries that so often characterizes discussions on migrant workers in the Gulf. REFERENCES CITED Boris, Eileen, and Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, eds. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mahdavi, Pardis. 2011. Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa: Decolonizing Practice edited by Peter R. Schmidt and Innocent Pikirayi London: Routledge, 2016. 324 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13171 Claire Smith Flinders University Produced by African and Africanist scholars, this book is important because it sheds light on archaeological practice and heritage conservation issues on a continent for which little material is available. Its overarching concern is how community archaeology can engender more inclusive heritage protection in Africa. This book is likely to precipitate a turning point in archaeology in Africa. One important theme is the role of archaeology (and archaeologists) in sustainable development and capacity building in Africa. This issue is directly addressed in chapters by Mehari and Ryano, Patrick Abungu, and Mayor and Huysecom. Mehari and Ryano’s chapter provides fascinating insights into past conflicts between local Maasai people and researchers, including the work done by Louis and Mary Leakey at Olduvai Gorge. The authors argue that a community-based transformation of archaeology in Africa is needed to advance the discipline at a global level and, more importantly, to serve and benefit Africans at local, national, and continental levels through incorporating their worldviews, interests, and needs in archaeological praxis. Mayor and Huysecom focus on the need for greater efforts in capacity building and development aid, and on decolonizing the museum. An intriguing innovation of their work in Mali is the establishment of a cultural bank, a village or municipal institution that includes a museum, a microcredit bank, and a cultural center aimed at promoting sociocultural and economic development of a rural community through culture. The authors argue that a critical view of these issues is needed for the management of heritage projects that integrate local communities. Other challenges to heritage protection are addressed by Aleru and Adekola in their discussion of “rich and reciprocal” archaeological engagements with the Esie and Igbaja communities in northern Yorubaland. These positive developments are analyzed against a background of major obstacles to productive interactions between local communities and heritage-management stakeholders. These hindrances include religious intolerance, looting, nonadherence to traditional social factors, unethical archaeological practices, and the uncontrolled degradation of sacred forests that hitherto successfully preserved and protected heritage materials. Related issues are addressed by George Abungu. Focusing on Eastern Africa, he contends that the tendency toward a more pro-people, inclusive approach in the developed world has barely taken root in the developing world. He attributes this to the ravages of colonialism, land and heritage dispossession and appropriation, the denial of access to heritage and heritage rights, and, at times, the outright abuse and desecration of heritage places. A second theme concerns the politics of heritage and archaeological practice in Africa. This is explicitly addressed in chapters by Schmidt, Ndlovu, David and Sterner, and McDavid, Rizvi, and Smith. Schmidt and Ndovu undertake independent reviews of archaeological practice in Africa. Schmidt’s review of ethnoarchaeological work in Africa identifies significant variation in the degree of initiative taken by Book Reviews collaborators, control over research agendas, and benefits to communities. The work reviewed ranges from projects where archaeological objectives were opaque for local participants to those where community members were trained and became coproducers of knowledge. He concludes that “we are still struggling to develop healthy interchanges with community members as equals” and that “the greatest part of archaeological practice in Africa has yet to address community needs and sensibilities.” Ndovu focuses on the question of equity and critically analyzes a dichotomy between “African spiritual and European physical approaches to heritage management.” He emphasizes the historic protection of heritage sites by African communities using traditional approaches to safeguard them and calls for “the amendment of colonially framed heritage legislation, which emphasizes the significance of the physical approach over the spiritual significance of heritage.” The chapter by David and Sterner focuses on the Mandara Archaeological Project in Cameroon and Nigeria, undertaken between 1984 and 2008, at a time when community archaeology was more archaeology with communities rather than for communities. They address the questions: Were we taking part in a colonial enterprise? Or were we engaged with host communities in ways that benefited them and larger publics and the discipline of archaeology? This paper highlights a generational transformation in archaeological practice. Hard-hitting questions such as these are explored further in a conversation among McDavid, Rizvi, and Smith, which issues provocations and highlights heterogeneity in approaches to community archaeology and heritage in Africa. A third theme concerns the importance of memory and oral histories to the preservation of heritage in Africa. 285 This is explicitly investigated in chapters by Patrick Abungu, Apoh and Gavua, and Pikirayi. Patrick Abungu speaks to the economic value of local communities for opening up the Shimoni Slaves Caves in southeastern coastal Kenya as places of memory. Based on a case study of the construction of a proposed dam on the Black Volta River at Bui, in Ghana, the chapter by Apoh and Gavua demonstrates how archaeologists can intervene and successfully mediate in the negotiation and resolution of human rights and cultural heritage conflicts among affected communities associated with large-scale development projects in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa. Related issues are addressed in Pikirayi’s analysis of four case studies from Zimbabwe and South Africa in which he highlights the capacity of social memory to challenge authoritative, dominant, and highly contested narratives about African communities. Finally, Schmidt and Pikirayi’s book is notable for the interweaving of both eminent and early-career researchers, and both African and Africanist scholars. This network of key players tells us much about the process by which African archaeology is undergoing transformation. The powerhouse institutions stand out: the University of Pretoria, the University of Ibadan, the University of Calgary, the University of Geneva, the University of Ghana, Newcastle University, the University of Florida, and the National Museums of Kenya. The majority of authors have some kind of affiliation, either past or present, with one or more of these institutions. In addition, many of the authors are current or former executive or council members of the World Archaeological Congress. Written by leaders in their field, the chapters in this book capture a transformation in the archaeology in Africa. This book is integral to this transformation. To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria by Daniel Jordan Smith Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 272 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13162 Paolo Gaibazzi ZMO—Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient The monetization of social relations has been a recurrent theme, and paradox, in West African ethnography. Money seems to have penetrated even the most private spheres of social exchange, thereby threatening to depersonalize them, yet money also figures as the social and moral glue between persons. Smith’s To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job is a refreshing account of these paradoxes in Igboland, southeastern Nigeria, where wealth in money both combines with and rubs against the renowned African notion of “wealth in people.” Although the monograph is not concerned with historicizing the forces of monetization in Nigeria, it documents how the oil economy, among other macroeconomic forces, has entrenched money as a medium of social value and power. This is especially evident among men. Fleshing out the Nigerian adage “money makes the man,” Smith’s ethnography explores how money and sociality intertwine at each stage of men’s life-course, from boyhood to eldership. The staggering financial expectations surrounding respectable manhood have generated discontent about greed infecting society and eroding traditional values. Money is suspiciously asocial because so much of it is perceived to be obtained through illicit means at the detriment of collective prosperity, chiefly through corruption and crime—which 286 American Anthropologist • Vol. 121, No. 1 • February 2019 have earned Nigeria its infamous reputation. Thus, while money makes the man, it also potentially unmakes him. Money must be spent in ways that are at once prodigal and prosocial—what Smith calls “conspicuous redistribution.” Successful men invest in ancestral households and contribute to hometown associations, sponsor pompous weddings, and must of course satisfy their wife’s needs, pay for their children’s school fees, and help friends and clients in need. Rituals of conspicuous redistribution are “efforts to resocialize money” and thus serve to mitigate the growing disparities in Nigerian society, yet “they have the ironic effect of further valorizing money” and ultimately reproduce inequality (p. 20). Consequently, men face poignant “money problems” at all levels of the social hierarchy (chapter 3), which helps explain why masculinity may go awry (chapter 5). Smith nuances popular discourses about the crisis of masculinity invoked to explain the rise of deviancy, corruption, and violence in Nigeria. He argues that men generally seek to become “good men,” but in a context marked by high unemployment and high financial demands, some men may engage in “bad behaviors” in order to do so. After all, suspicious about how people obtain money, many Nigerians nevertheless seem to turn a blind eye to corrupted men and 419ers (fraudsters) who redistribute conspicuously. By documenting men’s tribulations with the ambivalent value of money in Nigeria, this book makes an original contribution to the growing scholarship on masculinity in Africa and beyond. Such tribulations are by no means unique to Nigeria, but this country appears to be an ideal testing ground for performative theories of gender (pp. 207–9). To “perform” as a man, from the bedroom to the boardroom, is an emic concept in Nigeria. Men go out of their way to communicate, often excessively and theatrically, their ability to speak, walk, dress, consume, and, ultimately, spend “befittingly” to their perceived status. Disclosing the intimate worlds of money-made masculinity is another key objective of Smith’s book. The rise of global discourses on romantic love and companionate marriage has made intimacy a central object of inquiry in anthropology. Engaging with this scholarship, chapter 1 and 2 describe how the decline of arranged marriages and greater acceptance of premarital romance open up spaces of courtship unavailable to previous generations. Stronger conjugal cooperation and women’s increasing access to the labor market further encourage men to take an active role in childrearing. This call for greater intimacy does not necessarily limit the power of money; on the contrary, it often incites it, for demonstrations of love and care are bound up with the injunction on spending. This extends to the care for ailing parents, whom the son will eventually have to bury through a proper (read: expensive) funeral in order to be considered a complete man (chapter 6). Once again, monetization instigates in men a constant state of anxiety about the potentially crass motivations behind sex, love, and care, and about underperforming or being outperformed by wealthier men. For Smith, however, intimacy is larger than love and affection; it essentially stands for face-to-face sociality (pp. 4, 213). This may be too broad a definition, but it is one that nonetheless enables Smith to highlight the continuing prominence of personalistic ties. Chapter 4, one of the best of the book, takes us inside tennis clubs that Smith has been frequenting for more than two decades. The chapter reveals the hierarchical comradery that develops among relatively affluent men through sport, drinks, chat, gifting, and mutual support. Club homosociality, as Smith elegantly shows, is not necessarily set apart from and against other cross-gender intimacies. It sustains heterosexual infidelity by placing a premium on members’ ability to support trophy girlfriends at the same time as it monitors men’s reputation as loving husbands and family providers. Written in a very accessible style, To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job is a remarkable analytical piece in that it unravels how masculinity, intimacy, and money intersect at every twist and turn of southeastern Nigeria’s vast social landscape. It is the result of Smith’s twenty-five-year engagement with Nigeria and features stories from friends and interlocutors of all ages, social classes, vocations, reputations, locations (rural and urban), and confessional orientations. Smith himself participates in the intimate worlds he describes and does so without becoming overly autobiographical. Implicitly, this is a manifesto of the value of longitudinal ethnography and attains a degree of methodological transparency and intellectual honesty that is uncommon in anthropology.