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652 American Anthropologist • Vol. 105, No. 3 • September 2003
experiences of different kinds of
gringos,
in developing his
connections between what has changed in such practices,
what has been introduced from outsiders, and changes in
mythological contents. Gow addresses an important matter:
why some myths, recorded before the time of his own re-
search, seem to have been forgotten by his interlocutors,
only partially remembered, or changed in significant ways.
He asks, "Why are myths told?," "Why do myths change?,"
"Why are myths forgotten?," "What does the 'death of
myth' mean?" Arguing that Piro myths are already trans-
forming before the transformations recorded in written col-
lections, the author engages in an analysis of semiotic trans-
formations between myths. That one particular story has
undergone prior (i.e., precollection) transformations can be
known by looking at how certain semiotic elements ("mo-
tifs"),
appear in other stories, both those told by people in
the same society, and yet others told elsewhere. Gow thus
attempts an application of Levi-Strauss's theory of myths as
"instruments for the obliteration of time" while updating
the structuralist program of understanding how myths
think themselves out through people of a certain region,
that
is,
how semiotic structures in myths change as "systems
of thought" change. Gow's analysis looks at this problem
from a field research perspective among Piro people, which
involves learning about communicative contacts between
people of different language groups and different kinds of
gringos
in the Bajo Urubamba, the maintenance of local dif-
ferences in the face of such contacts, and the nature (type,
performance, and contexts) of genres through which such
contacts were made.
Focusing on eight myths recorded at various times in Piro
history (including some told directly to him), Gow's an-
swers revolve around Levi-Strauss's idea that mythic narra-
tives manifest analogies between "new problems" or "ques-
tions"
that emerge through historical events, and old
("other")
problems. In Piro people's experiences, these
"questions" appeared as new contacts with new kinds of
people, motivating incidents of what he interprets to have
been strategic thinking by known individuals. Gow explores
the implications of several larger historical contexts, begin-
ning with an examination of the conditions of Piro enslave-
ment during the rubber boom era by gringos, for whom
they had willingly gone to work in order to receive Euro-
pean goods. After the appearance of "a new kind of gringo"
associated with evangelical Christianity, Piro came under
the tutelage of the
SIL
missionary Esther Matteson, began to
learn how to write, and gave up manioc beer (and with the
Adventists, the peccary meat so important to their diet).
Later, the appearance of Werner Herzog's European crew
filming the rubber-boom era story
Fitzcarraldo
(and Campa
people fleeing the work organized by that crew) was shortly
followed by Peter Gow's own appearance in the Bajo
Urubamba—a gringo anthropologist who could understand
some Piro and who had had a hallucinogenic experience,
but who mainly spoke Peruvian Spanish. While Piro under-
stood him to be a sympathetic person involved in learning
about their way of life, they also equated him with the
saca-
cara, cannibalistic strangers (especially gringos) who were
said to prey on local people (as they in turn had preyed
upon the white lipped peccaries).
As Gow notes his study would have achieved little if he
had only concluded that what Piro people have done, his-
torically, is to react as European colonial expansion pro-
ceeded to impinge upon their
lives.
Instead Gow argues, it is
necessary to demonstrate that the specific form of succes-
sive colonial situations arose from within the ways Piro peo-
ple set about constituting them. He writes, "I think that
myths are themselves historical products, and ones which
carry within themselves t h e traces of that which they seek t o
erase, their own former states" (p. 303). In fact, while using
Levi-Straussian language in which myths operate through a
logic of their own, his is a model of discursive production
within a complex dialogical context. Gow
is
braving the dif-
ficulties of trying to understand subjective experiences such
as an individual's reformulation of personal goals, halluci-
natory experiences, and philosophical complexities of Piro
understanding, but in the end we have an argument built
on considerable deductive reasoning from many hypotheti-
cal positions and "logical" connections, as well as t he use
of
Peruvian Spanish. The logic
is
Western logic, not necessarily
Piro logic. The translations we are given, to this reviewer's
ear, are summarized prose translations of what (if the Piro
are like other Amazonian people) could have been formally
structured (and in that
sense,
"poetic") oral performances in
Piro.
The argument proceeds too often through a "literal"
reading of the texts as they have been told to Gow or put
into written form by hi s missionary predecessors.
I conclude simply with a question about what has been
left out. What more would we know if more attention had
been paid to language? Gow's questions regarding how
myths change, and die out, are central to understanding
them, but the problems must also be addressed through the
methods of a kind of anthropology that, the author himself
admits, has been unsympathetic to Levi-Strauss.
The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropo-
logical Perspective. Ellen Gruenbaum. Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press,
2001.
242 pp.
ALMA GOTTLIEB
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
If rebutting ethnocentrism, embracing cultural relativism,
and advocating for social justice constitute the three legs of
the conceptual triangle that define the intellectual territory
covered by much of contemporary cultural anthropology,
then female genitals operations (FGOs) represent a dramatic
challenge to the subdiscipline. How can we simultaneously
avoid the dreaded accusation of ethnocentrism, uphold the
long-vaunted ideals of cultural relativism, and still promote
the elusive goals of gender equality (a component of the
quest for social justice) when faced with biomedically un-
necessary surgical procedures performed on girls who are
Book Reviews 653
not always willing, and who may later suffer severe medical
damage, psychological damage, or both, from the opera-
tions that are now performed in a variety of world commu-
nities from Africa
to,
increasingly, Europe and North America?
A
further complicating factor arises when some members of
the local communities practicing FGOs begin to press for
modification or even elimination of the often ritualized sur-
gery while other members of the same communities—usu-
ally a hefty majority—remain fervent supporters. Can an-
thropologists responsibly navigate the difficult theoretical
terrain and vexed ethnographic realities alike that charac-
terize this painful subject? Cultural anthropologist Ellen
Gruenbaum proves
a
wise guide to the troubling topic.
Gruenbaum offers intelligent discussion of the major is-
sues involved in the FGO controversy: religion, sexuality,
marriage, health ramifications, legal status, and social
change. In the course of conducting over five years' research
and residence in the Sudan between 1974 and 1992, Gruen-
baum achieved a high level of intimacy with many Suda-
nese women, enabling her to be an engaged listener and re-
port a variety of voices. She chronicles a gamut of reasons
for the surgeries, from Muslim piety to aesthetic preference
to enhancement of male sexual pleasure. Gruenbaum man-
ages to avoid passing easy judgments on such controversial
explanations while she still frankly acknowledges her hope
that the operations will eventually be eliminated.
Gruenbaum sagely emphasizes the existence of several
types of operations—ranging from a nick in the clitoris to
the complete cutting or excision of the clitoris, labia mi-
nora, and labia majora, accompanied by near-complete sew-
ing shut of the vulva. This discussion counterbalances the
simplistic discussion in popular writings that tend to reduce
both the methods and rationales of FGOs into single expla-
nations. The prevalent popular impression in the West is
that "Pharaonic circumcision" or infibulation—the most
extreme version of the surgery—is the only, or most wide-
spread, version, whereas it is in fact practiced by a minority
of populations who practice any sort of FGO, and in a re-
stricted region (Islamic northeast Africa). Moreover, Gruen-
baum points out that not all Muslims circumcise their
daughters, nor are all circumcising groups Muslim. Thus, al-
though most groups that Gruenbaum has studied in the Su-
dan are part of the Muslim zone in which infibulation is
common, Gruenbaum frequently reminds the reader that
these groups are not representative of all who perform
FGOs.
Above all, Gruenbaum insists that the women who per-
form the surgery, and their relatives who encourage them to
do
so,
are honestly convinced that they are doing their girls
a service—augmenting their fertility, their sexual allure,
their marriageability, even their gynecological health. Re-
porting the sociocultural foundation to such beliefs while
resisting ridiculing them is an anthropological challenge to
which Gruenbaum nobly rises.
Illustrating the unexpected complexities that may arise,
Gruenbaum offers a nuanced discussion of the link between
patriarchy and severity of FGOs in comparing two neigh-
boring villages in Sudan. In one—populated by descendants
of an immigrant West African group related to the Song-
hay—women are strictly secluded, and girls are given only
perfunctory genital surgeries. In a nearby village—inhabited
by an autochthonous Arabic group—women work outside
in the fields and are somewhat free to travel, and their
daughters are subject to the severest form of infibulation.
Moreover, when some members of both groups moved into
a new village (to take advantage of an irrigation scheme),
the gendered labor and lifestyle differences between the two
groups lessened as some West African immigrant women
began working in the fields while some Arabic women be-
came more secluded. However, the preferences for their
FGO types remained largely intact in both groups. Fascinat-
ingly, as girls from the two groups encountered one another
on a daily basis, they sometimes insulted girls of the other
group for their genital operations. "Hey, unclean!" yelled
the Arabic
girls ,
to which the West African girls might reply:
"When you run out of meat [flesh cut from repeatedly rein-
fibulating a woman's genitals following each childbirth],
will yo u buy some in the market?" (pp. 130-131).
Elsewhere, willingness to change the local surgical style is
more evident. Perhaps surprisingly to the outsider, in some
ethnographic settings, residents have actually responded to
awareness of the controversy surrounding FGOs by increas-
ing, rather than decreasing, the numbers of women who are
infibulated. Often this results from contact with infibulat-
ing groups who more effectively tease their noninfibulating
neighbors; or it could be from polygynous men who marry
an infibulated woman, experience increased sexual pleas-
ure,
and persuade their noninfibulated wives to undergo the
surgery. Nevertheless, the greater trend is toward either con-
version from severe to milder forms of the surgery, or to-
ward eradication. Gruenbaum is optimistic that "the
conditions are ripe" (p. 194) for educational messages dis-
seminated with respect and cultural sensitivity about the
risks of
FGOs
to be heard and heeded.
For all its virtues, the book has not developed certain
theoretical lines as fully and expansively as it might have. A
model of the cultural construction of risk, as advanced by
Mary Douglas and others, would be highly suitable to the
material in this book. Nor does Gruenbaum deploy the dis-
tinction that some cultural anthropologists have made in
recent years between intellectual and ethical relativism—a
distinction that would have gone some way to provide theo-
retical foundation to the political stance that Gruenbaum
herself endorses without fully scrutinizing its intellectual
genealogy. That aside, the book is at once an excellent over-
view and a finely grained case study to a topic that consti-
tutes a veritable moral thicket. The volume would make a
provocative addition to an upper-level undergraduate course
on comparative gender issues, international women's health,
and the uses and limits of cultural relativism; cross-listed
courses in anthropology and women's studies would be par-
ticularly suitable; in a small seminar setting, even bright be-
ginning undergraduates would learn much. The writing is
clear and jargon-free, making it accessible to undergraduate
654 American Anthropologist • Vol. 105, No. 3 • September 2003
nonmajors and general readers. My theory-oriented cavils
above aside, the book is also rich enough to provide ample
food for thought for graduate students.
Anthropologists have been slow, even reluctant, to join in
the international debate regarding FGOs, no doubt hyper-
aware of the intellectual, ethical, and political hazards in-
volved in any position they might espouse. But th e past dec-
ade has seen a spate of articles and a small number of books
on the issue by anthropologists. Gruenbaum's fine volume
joins two excellent edited collections (Hernlund et al. in
press;
Shell-Duncan and Hernlund 2000) in acknowledging
that there is indeed an important contribution to the grow-
ing international conversation about FGOs to be offered by
cultural anthropology.
REFERENCES CITED
Hernlund, Ylva, Fuambai Ahmadu, Bettina Shell-Duncan, and
Henrietta Moore, eds.
In
press
Female Genital Cutt ing i n th e
World:
The
Challenge of a
Trans-Cultural Encounter.
Berkeley:
University of California
Press.
Shell-Duncan, Bettina, and Ylva Hernlun d, eds.
2000 Female "Cir cum cis ion " in Afri ca: Culture, Controversy, and
Change. Boulder:
Lynne
Rienner.
Archaeology and the Modern World: Colonial Tran-
scripts in South Africa and the Chesapeake. Martin Hall.
New
York:
Routledg e, 2000. 218 pp.
MARY C. BEAUDRY
Boston University
Postcolonial theory has h ad far less inf luen ce on the work
of
historical archaeologists than one might expect. Yet this
body of theory has the potential to affect the field pro-
foundly because the preponderance of work done by histori-
cal archaeologists focuses directly on colonial projects in a
wide array of settings around the world. This situation is es-
pecially true in North America, where the practitioners in
the field have repeatedly been urged to fall in behind one or
another unifying paradigm espoused by a prominent his-
torical archaeologist. In the 1970s the call was to the proces-
sualist camp; postprocessual influences on historical archae-
ology have come largely from the realm of critical theory
and the strong programmatic statements from some quar-
ters that historical archaeology is primarily about the study
of capitalism and how it shaped the modern and contempo-
rary world.
Martin Hall has taken on board the notion that historical
archaeology must attend to the impact of capitalism and the
emergence of the modern world, but he seeks in the present
book to examine the global reach of colonialism and its im-
pacts as the major force in the emergence of the modern
world. In so doing he draws from postcolonial theory, as
well as from the work of Michel Foucault and J a me s Scott, to
forge an approach that, he claims, links texts with material
assemblages.
Hall's aim is to develop a consistent theoretical approach
to understanding the material conditions that peoplf expe-
rienced under colonial regimes.
A
critical element of the dis-
courses of colonialism, one that Hall sees as key for compre-
hending the meanings of excavated remains and surviving
architecture and landscapes, is to be found in the accounts
written by contemporary observers. Such accounts, Hall
notes,
serve to translate experience into texts, which in turn
become material things. At the same time texts constitute
symbols of many things that, although important in the
past, cannot be observed directly in t h e present.
From Foucault, Hall takes the notion of "statements"—
descriptions of the world that are subject to multiple inter-
pretations because they have shifting meanings and are rife
with ambiguity. This he folds into Scott's notion of "tran-
scripts," which are dialogues about power relations. Hall
sees the transcript as "a web of relations that entwine both
objects and words" (p. 16). He acknowledges that his tran-
scripts, interpolations of texts produced by people involved
in one way or another with colonial projects, form the basis
of his conception of historical archaeology. Transcripts exist
and operate at various levels. Some are public, overt state-
ments by those in power. Others are hidden, in the sense
that they originate with the powerless and often must be
drawn into view through a close examination of how subal-
terns resist authority and the power of those who would rule
over them. This ver sio n of historical archaeology
is
transdis-
ciplinary, Hall notes, in that it draws its evidence from
sources that traditionally have not been used in combina-
tion (that is, the types of evidence employed by historians
versus those employed by archaeologists).
Because colonialism was imbedded in a particular eco-
nomic system and was a widespread global phenomenon
that had certain general characteristics of form, but that
nevertheless varied according to local contexts, Hall
sees
th e
need for historical archaeologists to frame their work in
terms of global comparisons. He selects colonial South Af-
rica and the colonial Chesapeake as subjects because they
"shared an underlying set of economic imperatives" (p. 18),
noting that valid comparisons can be made only if one first
comprehends the local conditions under which colonialism
unfolded. The archaeologist must then tack back and forth
between consideration of the local and the global, attending
all the while to the dimensions of gender, race, and slavery
that loomed so large in colonial interactions.
In developing his transcripts, Hall looks closely at slavery,
architecture, town planning, and landscapes of the 17th-
and 18th-century Cape colony, comparing each with 18th-
century Chesapeake examples. His greatest concern, how-
ever, is to understand how the forms that slavery and colo-
nial regimes took in the Cape colony helped to bring about
the conditions one sees in present-day South Africa. He
writes vividly and compellingly about both historical devel-
opments and contemporary conditions in South Africa. The
English colony in the Chesapeake serves primarily as a
sounding board against which Hall tests his reconstructed
transcripts of colonial discourse in South Africa.
