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For cultural anthropology, I think an excellent introductory text is Keesing and Strathern’s “Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective”:http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Anthropology-Contemporary-Roger-Keesing/dp/0030475821

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I see Moore as having brilliantly mastered critical theoretical approaches to government. I am not yet convinced that those approaches will help us best to see what is distinctive about local modes of habitation.

I am reminded again of one of my favorite paragraphs by Victor Turner, from “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors.”

In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of edible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them are what tend to survive in the field experience.”

I have certainly found this to be true in the twist and turns of the field experience I call my life, as well as the fieldwork proper I did in Taiwan. One of the things I find most disturbing about too many anthropological works (or at least the ones I read) these days is the combination of belaboring theory (mostly a matter of bows and obeisances to current buzzwords and gurus) and its cookie cutter application to data that turns out to be thin, indeed. (I refer to the use of a couple of quotes or anecdotal recountings of cases that provide no useful evidence for pursuing questions about details for which the belabored theory fails to provide an explanation.)

I must, however, say a thank-you to whoever it was who recommended Sandra Bamford’s Biology Unmoored, which I am finding very good, indeed.

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That whole problem of not wanting to repeat what has been done before is so vexing! On the one hand, who wants to go on reinventing the wheel. On other hand, subjecting the whole discipline anthropology to the logic of fashion (the avant garde, the new) could be really damaging.

I do think again that Moore is sensitive to the concern I articulate here. I was warmed and heartened that he acknowledged the translocal nature of Malinowski’s Trobriand writing! This is just something I am tracking (the relative importance of culturally unique constructs informing land tenure in the chiefdom)as a way of assessing what makes an assemblage in anthropology today.

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This is perhaps worth dwelling on a bit more. The challenge of appealing (to fellow anthropologists) across really quite radically different places and peoples is not insignificant. On the one hand, an older generation might have once felt comfortable with a certain amount of general knowledge about all of the world’s peoples– but that is clearly not the case today. This means that every monograph or article needs to re-introduce even us specialists to the details of “old-fashioned social stucture” in the Tangwena chiefdom (or wherever else) if we are to have any access to the argument… however… on the other hand… it has become impossible for most graduate students and young scholars to imagine doing so because that looks exactly like repeating work that is already out there, i.e. done in detail by colleagues familiar with the Tangwena (or whoever else) and thus something that we should be expected as readers to have encountered, or else go to the library to fetch. Add to this the post-1980s concern with the general acceptance of the impossibility of representing social reality, and you have a recipe for texts that don’t really give you enough rope.

I think Moore is occupying more of a middle ground here than say, Bill Maurer’s book on islamic finance which, while dazzling and brilliant in places taught me approximately 0 about Islamic finance. From Moore I am certainly learning more about Zimbabwe ‘s northeast corner than I ever thought possible, but not they way I might expect if I picked up a book by a journalist about the same topic.

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But this is not what Moore wants to do. Moore takes Scott’s elegant analysis of the failures of rationalized planning and tie it up in knots [sorry]. His goal is similar to that of Li in a recent article; she writes: “I reframe the question posed by Scott—why have certain schemes designed to improve the human condition failed?—to examine the question posed so provocatively by James Ferguson: What do these schemes do? What are their messy, contradictory, conjunctural effects?” Moore does not want to help us understand why, he wants to understand *how*. Again, I assimilate this as a shift in anthropological priorities from advancing general concepts to conveying particular stories.

Thus, the difficult narration is *meant* to reflect an on-the-ground (historical, cultural, territorial) difficulty. This is what I was highlighting earlier by referring to the ‘ambitiousness’ of the text.

Yet, I am not sure that showing that government is divided against itself because bureaucrats are territorial too (like tribesmen), and that it is always subject to resistances of various kinds, necessarily alters the picture of modern government as articulated by Scott. I am not convinced that simply *adding* stuff to the picture means that Scott’s key features of modernist planning do not in fact operate in the way that he suggested (through a set of reasoned principles and aesthetic conventions).

Also, I continue to worry about Moore’s ‘colonial’ translation strategy. Take this sentence about spirits: “Ancestral spirits could also govern subjects, acting on their actions, exercising influence on their habits, regulating their conduct.” The ancestors were also DA’s! Somehow, I feel sentences like this one fail to capture what is distinctive about ancestral power. I am wondering specifically: what *are* the spirits? Whose spirits are they? What theory of personhood and fortune connects ancestral favor/disfavor with individual outcomes? What ideology of efficacy informs these connections?

Following this, the whole world of the Tangwena chiefdom remains frustratingly hard to see. I think we are getting an excellent view of two different domains: the state and the family. Yet, I am a third of the way through the book and I feel completely in the dark right now about Tangwena as a political unit. I want to know more about the cultural concepts that inform the constitution of the chiefdom as a social unit. I suspect that Moore is deliberately resisting discussion of old-fashioned ‘social structure.’ But without better description of the chiefdom as a social system, we end up assimilating its principles to those that inhabit the other social domains that Moore brilliantly chronicles. Thus, the whole social field appears fundamentally structured (all the way down) by agonistic power plays. And ancestral spirits start to sound like District Administrators!

And there is the question of brute force. Much of this story is set in motion by the fundamental fact that Africans were systematically dispossessed of their lands under colonial rule. All of the culturalist argument about forms of government does not, thankfully, disguise this fact in Moore’s account. As much as this book wants to do sophisticated things with the analysis of power, I think the main story here is about racist violence and its effects through time.

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Regarding the writing, there are some passages which are absolutely riveting – such as taking the cattle for a “dip” in Chapter 3, but they are often followed by passages which are rather dull or tortuous making for some bumpy driving. I think this is necessary somehow, since bureaucratic encounters are hard to convey in the same way as scenes from life around the settlement, but I do find that I’ll be reading along at a rapid clip for a couple of pages and then suddenly hit a page which requires careful re-reading in order to figure out all the various agencies and players being discussed.

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