MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY impact of poverty among African Ameri- cans, Latinos, women, and children. This leads to the assertion that racial ...
556 impact of poverty among African Americans, Latinos, women, and children. This leads to the assertion that racial discrimination is an "incremental disadvantage," and by implication, an exaggeration of a more generalized social class oppression. Some of Kiefer's own statistical data suggest otherwise. How can one characterize the 60 percent rate of poverty among elderly, black women living alone as an incremental disadvantage? Or attribute the three-fold difference between black rates of poverty and those of non-Hispanic whites to a "subtle" class and racially based American elitism? In fact, the most pernicious and stable feature of poverty in the United States is the glaringly disproportionate racial and gender composition of the subgroups with the most disparate rates. It is this aspect of poverty that Kiefer's conceptual framework cannot accommodate. His theoretical commitment to a political economy of poverty turns out to be an updated version of the culture of poverty paradigm liberally infused with underclass theory he neither references nor acknowledges. Overall, I would recommend this book for its intended audience but only in conjunction with supplemental readings.
What Makes Women Sick: Maternity, Modesty and Militarism in Israeli Society. Susan Sered. Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2000. x + 194 pp. DAPHNA BIRENBAUM-CARMELI
Head, Department of Nursing University of Haifa, Israel Studies of Israeli women tend to focus on their life conditions in a gendered macho culture that endorses a rhetoric of equality. Sharing this perspective, Susan Sered sets out to explore "the juncture of cultural constructions of femaleness and cultural constructions of illness in Israeli society" (p. 2). In her perceptive analysis, Sered looks at women's condition within major social
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institutions in Israel. The religious and the medical establishment, the state and the army, the media and consumer capitalism are all described as patriarchal systems that occasionally compete over but mostly collaborate in scrutinizing and controlling women's bodies. Within this context, Sered examines the health consequences of a lifetime under male scrutiny, a lifetime of responsibility that is devoid of authority. The general background of the discussion is Jewish Israeli pronatalism, which constitutes motherhood as a national mission. Collaboration between the state and the medical establishment results in the constitution of pregnancy and birth as sicknesses, in restricting birth grants to women who give birth in hospitals, as well as in intrusive, male-dominated abortion committees. More generally, the woman's body emerges as fragile and disease-ridden. Sered traces a similar image for the Israeli army, where female soldiers are playing the stereotypical "neat and sexy" female role, translated here into vulnerability and rapeability. Rather than being empowered through service, Israeli women soldiers learn to see themselves as in need of the protection of strong, healthy male soldiers. The exclusion of women from combat roles is also justified in terms of the risk of rape. Ironically, the image of rape-ability is further enhanced by the prevalent sexual abuse in the army, which, until recently, was generally accepted, especially if it involved high-ranking or elite-unit personnel. Sered points to the further irony of women finding a rescue from sexual abuse in the patriarchal medical establishment. Another kind of female involvement in army-related spheres is women's role as worried mothers. While they are expected to raise healthy children and then to turn them over to the army, Israeli mothers lack any influence concerning their children's military future. Sered depicts this and other militaryrelated situations as a culture of violence.
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which jeopardizes women's health and security. The Mikveh—aritualpublic bath—is another site of scrutinizing women's bodies, which are thereby constituted as in need of regular purification. While the Mikveh is attended mainly by religious women, every Israeli woman is required by the monopolistic religious authorities to dip in the Mikveh before her wedding. Although many secular Israelis consider the requirement abusive and intrusive, this dictate has not been seriously challenged so far. Sered finds the Israeli media displaying great interest in women's bodies. In cases of women's harassment, the media often dwell on details of the women's dress and physiology while ignoring more crucial aspects of the phenomenon. Moreover, blame for having been harassed is often put on the women themselves, for example, by claiming the way they dressed had been provocative. In Israeli advertisements Sered finds women depicted as faceless, slim, passive, subordinate, and associated with relatively inexpensive items. Orthodox women are subject to particularly close inspection by their community under the requirement of "modesty." The author notes that all of the patriarchal institutions she examines employ female gatekeepers (the Mikveh attendant, the midwife, the female officer, the social worker in the abortion committee), who lack authority but are the ones to confront and scrutinize the female audience. She links the widespread preoccupation of Israeli women with dieting and the prevalence of eating disorders among them to this tight corporeal scrutiny. The book ends with a list of acts of female resentment, such as bypassing the state abortion committee, indulging in elegant "modest" clothes, or opting for natural birth. While aware of the scope of the challenge, the author concludes on a more optimistic note that leaves some hope for change. Methodologically, the book is based on statistical data, interviews, short case studies,
557 and newspaper analyses. Quotes from traditional Jewish sources are spread throughout the volume. Sered's analysis clearly benefits from the perspective she can bring to her subject as a non-Israeli Jewish woman who has spent a considerable time in Israel. The ample material Sered has brought together for her study adds up to a comprehensive picture of women's lives in Israel. Touching on central spheres of life, she unveils sophisticated dynamics of corporeal scrutiny and draws attention to the making and working of gendered hierarchy. The heterogeneous Israeli context, where traditional notions co-exist alongside liberal worldviews, is a rich setting for the important issues that are examined in this book. Sered's study is entitled What Makes Women Sick. However, as the book progresses, the focus shifts to the subject of control and scrutiny of women's bodies in Israel, and the issue of health is somewhat pushed aside. Women's distress, which emerges clearly from the abundant material, certainly demands a toll of their health. However, the links between corporeal subordination and health might be further elaborated in order to substantiate the author's intriguing argument that "Gender hierarchy makes women ill, which generates and reinforces beliefs in female corporeal inferiority, which justifies the subordination of women, which makes women ill" (p. 2). Being an Israeli woman, I found Sered's book illuminating and perceptive. At the same time, I felt that it underrepresented the life experience of secular, middle-class Israeli women. While this substantial sector shares some conditions and attitudes with Sered's mostly religious subjects, it also differs considerably. Another source of this partiality may have been the general overlooking of the private sphere, which is of supreme significance in Israeli culture and in which women play a major role. As such, this sphere is highly relevant to women's overall welfare and life experience.
558 Having said that, the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of Israeli culture and society and of Israeli women in particular. More generally, it contributes to the understanding of oppressive dynamics in complex contemporary contexts. The book is very well written, using a clear, friendly language that renders it readily accessible not just to social scientists but also to interested lay people.
Doing Science + Culture: How Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies are Changing the Way We Look at Science and Medicine. Roddy Reid and Sharon Traweek, eds. New York/London: Routledge, 2000. viii + 339 pp. JENNIFER L. CROISSANT
Program on Culture, Science, Technology, and Society Department of Materials Science and Engineering University of Arizona In this collection, Reid and Traweek articulate a vision of cultural studies of science and technology as experimental, interdisciplinary, reflexive, and critical. Cultural studies of science are positioned apart from traditional disciplines such as anthropology, traditional literary scholarship, science itself, and the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The theme motivating this collection is knowledge production. After a synthetic introduction, Traweek opens the book with an essay historicizing the current moment/movement of international knowledge production. She ties new knowledge possibilities to the emergence of postindustrial economies and geographic and demographic shifts, using the geological metaphor of fault lines, which are places of instability and change. Abraham makes explicit the international scope of the text, examining the negotiations of Indian scientists, defining both "Indianness" and science in astronomical research in
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postwar India. Fujimura continues this theme, exploring how Japanese and U.S. genomics researchers use and contest tropes of national identity to gain resources and legitimacy for their work, producing "East," "West," and "science." Rhodes engages U.S. popular culture. She writes about the confluence of psychology, sexology and psychoanalysis, and controversy in William Martson's 1940s Wonder Woman comic books. It is in the ambiguous relationship between Amazons and "deviant" sexualities inferred by Mars ton's critics that Rhodes points out the contradictory readings of these comic books and the evertenuous patterns of normalcy. The next three contributions, by Reid, Orr, and Martin, engage health and issues of researcher identity directly. Reid analyzes public health interest in smoking. He elusively positions himself in the text, noting subjects1 varying assumptions about whether or not his interest in the subject is warranted by his being a smoker or not. It is an ethically rich essay, calling into question distinctions between self and other that undergird most anthropological epistemologies. Orr's piece has a similar reflexive cast but a poetic tone, weaving together media, panic disorder, cybernetics, and pharmaceutical companies into a text about the promise and peril of "cyberpsychiatry" as a mode for understanding human cognition. Martin follows with an essay problematizing the concept of rationality, critically examining conflicting ideas found in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the purported "irrationality of the non-modern" (especially interpretations of Amish/ Mennonite religious communities), and genetic and biochemical theories of manic depression. She analyzes the irrationality of everyday life, attempting to understand the power relations that serve to pathologize some forms of mania while colonizing and valorizing its uncootainability. The contributions by Gilbert, Barad, Balsamo, and Fischer discuss curricular or
