On the face of it, “Radical Hope: Ethics In The Face of Cultural Devastation”:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LEARAD.html is an impossible book to write and write well. What are the odds that a psychoanalytic take on Aristotle will tell us anything at all worthwhile about the collapse of the Crow lifeworld in the American west in the late nineteenth century? And yet despite the odd choice Jonathan Lear had managed to write a book that will appeal to anthropologists despite the fact that it infringes on what many of us would consider ‘our turf’.

There are three major challenges that Lear has to overcome in Radical Hope. First, Lear has got to actually learn about the Crow. This means learning about history, anthropology, the writing of Crow scholars, and others — a tall order for someone whose previous books have been much more philosophical. Second, the cultural politics of writing about the fate of the Crow are complex, and in this book Lear must strike a respectful and informed (see #1) tone about life on the reservation and the history of the Crow people. Learning just enough about the Crow in order to riff on their history would make Lear the last of a long line of white men who use Indians for their own ends. This is a job that anthropologists are particularly concerned be done well, because we have so often done it badly. Finally, Lear must try to say something new and intelligent about culture change, innovation in tradition, and the crushing psychological aspects of colonization — no easy task given the amount of ink spilled on the topics, and especially given how much of it has been spilled on the American west.

At just under 140 pages, Lear has clearly chosen what I call the ‘Imagined Communities’ route — when writing on a topic that deserves 1,000 pages it is sometimes easier simply to write 100 and make sure they are suggestive. While I know nothing about the Crow, it seems to me that Lear has done an admirable job catching up on the literature, including that of Crow authors, and in being fair to the thoughts and beliefs of Crow people. And he manages to do this despite the fact that, at a basic level, he is after bigger philosophical game than “just” Crow history. Even at points where he drifts off into the philosophical stratosphere to inquire what sort of human soul is suggested by his interpretation of one possible meaning of one report of a nineteenth century Crow autobiography, you do feel that Lear has managed to tether himself as much as possible ‘in the ethnography’ given that his analytic framework is sky-high.

In the end I think Lear has also managed to say something of value. At a certain level anthropologists are used to the idea that radical cultural innovation can still be ‘traditional’ even if its surface forms seem quite different from what has come before provided that the process, rather than the content, of change be ‘traditional’. What is valuable in his account is the way that he describes the ‘radical hope’ that can — must? — be central to this process and how it might be fitted in a larger philosophical anthropology which combines psychoanalysis and Aristotelean virtue ethics. It is this hook up to larger social-theoretic or political-philosophical trends that I found interesting since this sort of material is not usually dealt with by those streams of thought.

The risks of failure for a book like Lear’s were quite high, and I must admit I feel a bit ambivalent recommending the volume whole-heartedly — turning a project that could have been disastrous into a book that is very good is, after all, a different sort of thing from writing a book that is truly great! But this book has many advantages: effortlessly clear prose, its unusual juxtaposition of topics, the speed at which it goes down, and the way it foregrounds the fate of the Crow in a world that is too ready to forget our frontier history. It is good to teach with — perfect for a ‘deep thought’ undergrad honors course, and is great for social sciences who want something a little soulful to ponder. While I have not yet heard the reaction from Crow people themselves, I’d recommend Lear’s book to any anthropologist who wants to read an elegant, thoughtful piece — I’m glad to see that Jonathan Lear has decided to encroach on ‘our’ turf.