American Ethnologist

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Revoicing" by teachers in classroom group conversations creates participant frameworks that facilitate students' "alignment" with academic tasks and their socialization to roles and iden tities in intellectual discourse. Three examples demonstrate the potential of "revoicing" to: (1) position students in differing alignments with propositions and allow them to claim or disclaim ownership of their position; (2) share reformulations in ways that credit students with teachers' warranted inferences; (3) scaffold and recast problem-solution strategies of non-native-language students.

Amal Fadlalla's Embodying Honor: Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration in Eastern Sudan, although based on her dissertation, is greatly enhanced by her postdoctoral research at Harvard and further fieldwork in the Red Sea area of eastern Sudan among the poverty-stricken Hadendowa (a historical relationships of power, marginality, and social conflict" (p. 5), and that "Hadendowa women embody the cultural meanings of affinity, motherhood, and regeneration" (p. 85). This graceful work manages to combine demographics, poetry, and ethnography rather seamlessly, all the while making a major contribution to the fields of African ethnography, women's studies, feminist theories, Muslim studies, population and health, and Sudanese studies.

In social theory, there is a tension between approaches which privilege practice and those focusing on discourse. Recently, such dualisms have been challenged, for example in the analysis of social movements, by perspectives which seek to overcome divisions between culture and politics. I argue that these challenges can be promoted by focusing on how culture as a human activity of working in the world, in which the material and the symbolic are unified, exists in tension with culture as a commodified object in the context of hegemonic constructions of culture which construct it as primarily a set of symbolic representations. I examine this theme in relation to the efforts of young blacks in the city of Cali, Colombia, who use rap music to make a cultural identity as a way of life, which also involves class issues in the urban environment, while at the same time they construct their culture as a object designed to move in circuits of consumer commities and, especially, state and NGO funding. The local state and the voluntary sector also work on culture as a more limited set of expressions, seeking to depoliticize it.

The war in the former Yugoslavia was considered as one of the most bloodshed wars of the 20 th century which brought back in the European media discourse the question of the Balkans as the primitive Other of the continent. Reports regarding ethnic cleansing, rapes as one of the war practices and deep animosity used to see the light of various media almost on a daily basis.

While a book on drinking in Japan is relatively rare, a book on women, alcohol, and codependency in Japan is even more unusual. Hence the publication of "The Too-Good Wife" is both an important and welcomed contribution to our knowledge about the culture of drinking in Japan. This is a superbly written and fascinating account of Japanese women's attempts to deal with substance abuse problems in their husbands and sons. What little we know about drinking in

Good books often do the eye-opening work of debunking popular stereotypes. The Hidden Life of Girls is that kind of book, offering welcome relief from widely available yet flawed accounts of gendered speech. It accomplishes other goals set out by Goodwin, but its achievement extends beyond her stated aims. Discussion of the book might be contextualized in any number of ways, but only a few are considered here. I am most impressed by how Goodwin questions gender stereotypes, engages with an appropriate methodology, and looks at how class status is enacted.

Reckonings is a fresh and expertly argued study of modernity and modern art in contemporary Egypt. As winner of the 2007 Albert Hourani Prize (awarded by the Middle East Studies Association for the best book in Middle East studies), it invites the close and engaged reading of any anthropologist interested in the Middle East and its national public cultures. The book, however, deserves more than an audience of regional specialists alone. Jessica Winegar has framed her study in a very accessible and appealing way. It makes a splendid contribution to

Lurking deep within the brain, a tumor glares red in a computer-generated picture of a man collapsed at a Las Vegas gambling table. This three-dimensional view looking through the forehead, shows the skull's surface as white and the brain's surface as yellow, based on data collected by a computed tomography [CT] scanner.

tion of structure at both individual and group levels. The central concern, then, is with the construction of meanings-or questions as to how the "fiction" of celebration is achieved. The text, however, is less questioning than illustrative.

Based on her fieldwork in a silk factory in Hangzhou, China, in the 1980s and 1990s, Lisa Rofel writes an ethnography in which she participates quite fully. Her theme is modernity, an idea which preoccupies the people of China. The post-Mao government uses the idea of modernity to distinguish itself from the radical politics of the previous era. Rofel's subjects also engage with modernity to reposition their lives, which are loaded with historical and political baggage. She focuses on such yearnings among women workers in the silk factory and stresses their agency when they construct narratives within an overarching state discourse. For an older generation who became factory workers around the time the Communists came to power in 1949, modernity is intertwined with what the women considered to be transgression-working in the factory. Recapturing the revolutionary rhetoric for their own lives, women workers see their engagement with labor as politically correct and personally gratifying. They look back with nostalgia on the early revolutionary period's imagined socialist future in which they should have a part, and come to terms with their present marginality. For the generation who came of ageduringthe radical political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the present regime's idea of modernity is a traumatic reversal. Labor is no longer valued, nor are Maoist political priorities. Commercial activities and self-interested pursuits, once denounced and repressed, now reign supreme among officials and in popular minds. Among the women workers, there is a sense of betrayal. Workers in this generation also feel ill equipped for professionalism, global horizons, and entrepreneurial energies. They vent their frustrations in individual and collective episodes in which they flout authority with political acts reminiscent of the radical days of the Cultural Revolution. Their deliberate and irreverent attitudes toward the factory

Intimate Enemies is a much-needed contribution to the anthropological literature of Mexico and Latin America as well as to the discipline more generally. Aaron Bobrow-Strain's work focuses on the struggles of landowners in two municipalities in central Chiapas to manage, counter, and deflect nearly a century of state policy, economic transformations, and indigenous mobilization, culminating in the 1994-98 agrarian conflict. This focus on elites is an important addition to the contemporary ethnographic field, which tends to privilege the study of excluded, marginalized, or subaltern communities. It also facilitates the articulation of his ethnographic data with an archival record that characteristically overrepresents the interests, deliberations, and practices of elites.

driven by Tonga nationalists. The Canadian school was much more independent in the way it managed itself. In Heller's research, nationalism is shown to be considerably weakened, whereas it is increasingly consolidated among the Tonga. Tonga nationalists were interested in creating a situation in which ethnicity and place were congruent. In Heller's school, the administrators acknowledged student linguistic and ethnic diversity, because they wanted to control it. Similarly, Tonga leaders have expressed great concern about the degree to which their children were being 'corrupted' by English and through the influence of other African languages (such as Ndebele and Shona). While the main issue in Heller's study involved controlling the influence of English, the primary concerns for the Tonga were the mitigation of outside linguistic influences, and the standardisation of Tonga. (Incidentally, Heller's use of the term 'minority' would be rejected by the Tonga, who insist it is derogatory, and who have argued for its replacement by 'indigenous'.)

Women... are seen in most studies as exploited and passive pawns.. . in an oppressive social system. My experience with the culture of North Yemen has allowed me to see another dimension of reality and t o consider women as active participants in a culture which, like all cultures, contains ambivalences, contradictions and dissonances (p. 97).

Lurking deep within the brain, a tumor glares red in a computer-generated picture of a man collapsed at a Las Vegas gambling table. This three-dimensional view looking through the forehead, shows the skull's surface as white and the brain's surface as yellow, based on data collected by a computed tomography [CT] scanner.