Book Reviews
The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home Inge Daniels, 2010, Oxford and New York: Berg, ISBN: 9781845205171, 243pp. Pb. £19.99. Reviewed by Kathryn Ehrich The opening premise of this book is to challenge the predominant Western stereotype of ‘the Japanese house’, often characterized in terms of a traditionalist and exoticized aesthetic: minimalist interiors designed for tea ceremonies, furnished with tatami mats and shoji screens, and inhabited by unfathomable people in kimonos. Of course some of these elements hark back to ancient values and art forms, such as we could see anywhere, if that is how we choose to go about looking at life in particular ‘other’ places. What Daniels offers here is another way of understanding contemporary Japanese houses, the people who live in them and their domestic ‘stuff ’ (Miller 2009). Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and studies of material culture, she uses an ethnographic gaze and extensive fieldwork, rather than the purely architectural or aesthetic approaches that she cites as having contributed to stereotyped notions of Japanese domestic life. The first three chapters are organized around the relationship between spaces and their social uses and meanings. How have Japanese homes changed during the twentieth century and how do these changes reflect and shape changing ways of families being ‘at home’? What features of the house protect and/or connect the family in relation to the surrounding community? Daniels illustrates how boundary
objects (fences, gardens) and practices such as correct ways of waste disposal indicate changing social relations, and how spiritual connections with the wider community and ancestors are mediated through a gendered form of domestic labour. Chapters four, five and six address some of the ‘messiness’ of contemporary living in which the stereotypes referred to earlier are renegotiated, accommodated and transformed in contemporary domestic life. For example, conflicts between the ideal of an ordered, uncluttered space, and the need to keep objects that represent gift exchange relationships, are dealt with in various ways such as adding storage space, or sharing gifts within kin or community networks. In the conclusion, Daniels shows how domestic spaces, objects and practices can be read in terms of the renegotiation of traditional family models, gender and kin relations, changing spiritual ideologies, and the flow or blockage of systems of exchange and consumption, thus uniting the study of material culture and social structure (Hsu 1998). The book includes many photographs taken by Daniels, participants in her fieldwork and by British photographer Susan Andrews. The choice and presentation of the photographs avoids the coffee-table stylization of the Japanese minimal aesthetic Daniels is challenging in the book. The photographs are vital in conveying information but many of them are also beautifully taken and presented, illustrating in both the content and display contemporary ways of incorporating traditional and modern forms of material culture. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and found it a stimulating and satisfying read. If I have
Anthropology in Action, 19, 3 (2012): 66–70 © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action doi:10.3167/aia.2012.190306
Book Reviews
any quibbles, the labelling (or not) of the photographs is a little confusing, which Daniels attempts to justify early on. There are quite a lot of grammatical errors, and on occasion I was not completely sure of the meaning of a sentence as a result. I was also puzzled by what appeared to be the constrained or possibly somewhat self-conscious academic format. The book could, for example, have conveyed more of the emotional and sensory experiences of visual and cultural aspects of Japanese domestic life gained through contact with these Japanese people and families. Perhaps the slightly constrained feel of the writing reflects the embodied experience of entering intimate domestic spaces as an ethnographer, which can have this effect wherever it is conducted. This could be especially the case in a culture where even friends are not often welcomed into private homes, and moving around in general can feel like an exercise in containing one’s own body movements and not imposing on others’ space. But these are only minor points. The book should have a wide appeal, not just to students of architecture, aesthetics, anthropology and particularly students of material culture, but also to social scientists and historians interested in gender, domestic practices and theology, and the growing number of general readers interested in Japan. Kathryn Ehrich is a medical anthropologist and sociologist. Her work has encompassed social, cultural and ethical aspects of parenting and healthcare, and professional and user views on new health technologies, including assisted conception, stem-cell science and genetics.
References Hsu, E. (1998), ‘Moso and Naxi: The House’, in Naxi and Moso Ethnography: Kin, Rites, Pictographs, (ed.) M. Oppitz and E. Hsu (Zurich: Vokerkundemuseum Zurich), 47–80. Miller, D. (2009), Stuff (Cambridge: Polity).
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Weathering the World: Recovery in the Wake of the Tsunami in a Tamil Fishing Village Frida Hastrup, 2011, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, Studies in Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology series, ISBN: 9780857451996, 150pp. $70.00/£42.00 Reviewed by Natashe Lemos Dekker Frida Hastrup’s Weathering the World: Recovery in the Wake of the Tsunami in a Tamil Fishing Village is a vivid ethnographic account of how the villagers of Tharangambadi, a village on the coast of Tamil Nadu in Southeast India, experience recovery after the tsunami in 2004. According to Hastrup the process of recovery takes place precisely by gradually folding the occurrence of the tsunami into the ordinary. Herein she follows Das (2007) who has argued for a similar approach to understand how one makes the world one’s own again after a violent disruption. Both Das and Hastrup elaborate on the notion of recovery through the process of local understanding that interweaves the disaster with the ordinary. Rather than trying to achieve a sense of closure, the villagers incorporate the effects of the tsunami into their daily lives. In this way Hastrup conceptualizes disasters in line with the work by Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (2002) wherein disasters are not approached as single events but as processes. In her approach of disaster and recovery Hastrup provides significant empirical knowledge illustrating the general situation of the village and how various traces and elements of the disastrous event are framed into the everyday life in the wake of the tsunami. One of the strong elements of the book is the detailed ethnographic portrait Hastrup presents of people’s lives and how their perception of daily life has changed. By not addressing the tsunami as a detached event, but by incor-
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porating it into people’s daily lives, Hastrup is able to demonstrate how the disaster and the everyday life emerge as intertwined with each other. While the book offers a detailed account of this interweavement of ordinary life and the disastrous event, Hastrup does not offer a clear definition of what is meant by the ordinary. This leaves the reader guessing and obliged to attribute their own interpretation of what is aimed at. Each chapter elaborates eloquently on a different theme considering the notion of recovery. To name just a few, subjects include the local level of humanitarian support, onslaughts and possibilities brought about by the tsunami, and the materialization of loss and memory. Even though each chapter presents a separate topic, all can be traced back to the process of recovery and how the tsunami has become socialized in the everyday life of the villagers. A disadvantage that comes with this approach is that in describing different angles, not all can be thoroughly elaborated on. For example, even though gender is a recurring theme I believe it would deserve more in-depth analysis. In one of the chapters Hastrup illustrates how the specific gendered position of a woman and her life have been influenced by the tsunami. However, she does not theorize further on this subject by elaborating on the specific needs and experiences of women and men in the process of recovery. She could have made it more explicit that disaster management occurs on a gendered terrain (Bhatt 1995). Nevertheless, by approaching the concepts of vulnerability and recovery from various angles, Hastrup accomplishes demonstrating how multilayered these concepts are and how different levels of society are influenced by them. Another aspect I highly appreciated in the book was the author’s clear and transparent account of how she carried out her fieldwork. Hastrup realizes this by presenting us with a thorough mapping of her research settings and the lives of her informants. Moreover,
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she positions herself in a critical way in the research setting. This is of great importance, as being transparent enables further learning and reflection about anthropological tools for collecting data and how we go about fieldwork when studying disaster. According to Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (2002) there is a great need for ethnographic data on disaster. Methods wherein the researcher is present at the local level and in dialogue with the population are most appropriate to gather first-hand experiences and thus a proper understanding of the local circumstances. Hastrup definitely achieves this objective by presenting an indepth ethnographic account. The book will speak to scholars interested in the intertwinement of society, culture and the environment, and proves to be a valuable asset for students and researchers in the field of disaster studies and the anthropology of disaster. Natashe Lemos Dekker has recently graduated from the Research Masters ‘Gender and Ethnicity’ and in the Academic Masters ‘Cultural anthropology: Multiculturalism in a comparative perspective’, both at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. She has carried out field research among women whose family members disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship. Her research focuses on grief and mourning, continuing bonds, gender and political action. E-mail:
[email protected]
References Bhatt, M. (1995), Gender and Disaster: Perspectives on Women as Victims of Disasters (Gulbai Tekra, Ahmedabad, India: Disaster Mitigation Institute). Das, V. (2007), Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press). Hoffman, S M and Oliver-Smith, A (eds) (2002), Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press).
Book Reviews
Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions Henrietta L. Moore, 2011, Cambridge: Polity Press, ISBN: 9780745636467, 208pp., Hb. £47.50, Pb. £15.19. Reviewed by Jean-Baptiste Pesquet Henrietta L. Moore is well known for her scholarship about gender and sexuality that she has explored in Africa. With her latest book, Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions, she offers us the informed literature review of a senior scholar on the recent debates in social anthropology. Moore engages a wide reflection on a specific object of study: relationality in the context of globalization. Her main argument is that relationality has been increasingly problematized in the context of globalization but imagination and fantasy have been neglected in the conceptualization of relations between the self and others. She associates ethical imagination with the Foucauldian subjectification of the self as one of the main spaces where culture is created (Moore 2011: 15–22). Moore develops her theoretical argument drawing inductively from her fieldwork experiences. Throughout the book she raises several interesting theoretical issues but it is in the last chapter that Moore proposes a useful hypothesis to apply: affect is experienced as a means to realize an interior self which does not preclude a submission/resistance dualism (Moore 2011:194). However, Moore does not deepen this last suggestion. Therefore one should mention the scholarship of Pierre Hadot (Hadot 1995, 2002; Hadot, Carlier and Davidson 2003) that proposes numerous ‘spiritual exercises’. This may allow us to deepen the notion of schesis/habitus offered by Mahmood (2009: 200–7) because it presents affects as both ideal and material products of the self. It is also necessary to pay attention to the work of Talal Asad who develops a comparative reflection on the formation of body between secularism and religion. This offers us the historical perspective
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that Moore calls for studying affects (Asad 2003, 2011; Asad et al. 2009). This poststructuralist trend of academic research provides an epistemological critique of the notion of religion in Western academy that could be required in the study of globalization (Keane 2007: 223– 51; 2009). These studies, along with Mahmood and Hirshkind’s ones, challenge Moore’s critique of the Foucauldian subject as restricted to conscious subjectivity (Moore 2011: 75–6), for Foucault’s notion of discourse is intentional but a non-subjective one that may include an unconscious part (Veyne 2010: 18). Moore considers Foucauldian analysis entangled within a submission/resistance framework whereas Foucault’s notion of relational power tackles relations of force wherever they circulate (Foucault 1976: 121–2). Although Foucault paid more attention to submissive aspects of power, his ontology of relations of force does not preclude any empowerment as in its controversial articles on Iranian revolution (Foucault, Defert and Ewald 1994: 680–784). As such the Foucauldian ontology allows us to integrate her critique of the response mode of analysis of globalization in terms of suffering, exclusion and domination (Moore 2011: 68–72). One may also regret the absence of a broad methodological coherence throughout the book. A thematic organization is privileged in order to maintain a pluralist approach to the ongoing debates. Her aim is to propose original objects of studies and new perspectives for the theory of affects. However Moore mixes objects where affects are at stake, such as sex, body and studies of affects as such in Chapters 2, 4, 5 and 6. A complementary thematic approach could have been restricted to affects such as hope, dreams, pain, erotic, memory and world ending (Crapanzano 2004). An organized theory of affect may proceed by induction, starting from experiences of lived affects to conceptualizing the understanding of affects. Nevertheless, her impressive reviews allow her to rephrase disparate issues under a same interest in affects. It is only possible to
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acknowledge the complexity of such a task. The pluralist perspective that she introduces is certainly of great value to contemporary social anthropology, raising the hopes and desires in deepening the readings solicited. Jean-Baptiste Pesquet is a PhD student in political science at the Université Paris V. He studied in France, Lebanon, Canada and the U.K. His research interest is the development of theoretical tools to understand the discipline of existence in politics from an anthropological perspective. His fieldwork focuses on spirituality in Lebanon and the way subjects shape their relationship to death, pain, fear and life to open political opportunities. E-mail:
[email protected]
References Asad, T. (2003), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press). Asad, T. (2011), ‘Thinking About the Secular Body, Pain and Liberal Politics’, Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4: 657–75. Asad, T., W. Brown, J. Butler and S. Mahmood (2009), Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and
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Free Speech (Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California). Crapanzano, V. (2004), Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-philosophical Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Foucault, M. (1976), Histoire De La Sexualité, Tome 1: La Volonté De Savoir (Paris: Gallimard). Foucault, M., D. Defert and F. Ewald (1994), Dits Et Ecrits, 1954–1988. Tome III: 1976–1979 (Paris: Gallimard). Hadot, P. (1995), Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (Paris: Gallimard). Hadot, P. (2002), Exercices Spirituels Et Philosophie Antique (Paris: Albin Michel). Hadot, P., J. Carlier and A. I. Davidson (2003), La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (Paris: Libraire générale française). Keane, W. (2007), Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press). Keane, W. (2009), ‘Freedom and Blasphemy: On Indonesian Press Bans and Danish Cartoons’, Public Culture 21, no. 1: 47–76. Mahmood, S. (2009), Politique de la piété: Le féminisme à l’épreuve du renouveau islamique. Editions La Découverte. Moore, H. L. (2011), Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions (Cambridge: Polity). Veyne, P. (2010), Foucault: His Thought, His Character (Cambridge: Polity).
