Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable Eviatar Zerubavel. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-0-691-17736-6. 160 pp. £16.99

Reviewed by Sinem Gunes

Language reveals our way of thinking. It is from this basic idea that Eviatar Zerubavel's book examines the semiotic and cognitive asymmetry between what is considered normal and what is marginalised by and in the language. As a result of long-term work on sociology of language and following his book Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (2015), which focuses on the notion of ‘background’, the book analyses ‘markedness’ and ‘unmarkedness’ using Goffman's ‘sociology of everyday life’ approach and dealing mostly with the United States.

Divided into six chapters, the book argues that what is implicitly considered normal, self-evident and is therefore taken for granted remains ‘unmarked’ in language, while what is remarkable because it does not conform to the standards requires to be ‘marked’. The act of ‘marking’ has a social meaning and produces a supposed distinction leading to a non-equal distribution of cultural and social attention (11). Linguistic expressions concerning entities considered as minority, marginal, unknown, and unfamiliar are marked in language such as women's studies, openly gay, African Americans. This mechanism of semiotic ‘marking’ attributes a ‘deviant’ character to what is culturally considered non-standard and reinforces the ‘abnormalising’ and ‘othering’ of certain identity features, rather than others, whereas the ‘unmarked’, tacitly assumed by default, builds an unverified normativity in both the semiotic and cognitive spheres. Thus, the marked is remarkable, while the unmarked remains unremarkable, culturally invisible, and unquestioned.

Although the ‘normality’ may seem to be an inherent property or an individual opinion, the book shows that nothing is inherently normal, hence nothing is inherently marked or unmarked. What we assume by default is socially constructed and therefore varies from one culture to another, from one period to another. When specifying that one is Asian, overweight, or bisexual but passing without mention when it comes to a white heterosexual, we not only refer to a semiotic asymmetry but also to a political attitude. As we see in chapter 4, the normal is not a general category, its semiotic production and preservation are political. The unmarked allows the maintenance of a cultural dominance and the marked continues to be considered abnormal. Hence language reveals social hierarchies and political inequalities.

By exposing assumptions based on andronormativity, leukonormativity, heteronormativity, and able-bodied normativity, Zerubavel attempts to break the argument of an ‘inherent’ taken-for-granted of what is considered normal. The book seeks to show in chapter 5 that what we automatically take for granted escapes our attention and must be pointed out and questioned. It is often unnamed and uninvestigated, and being a blind spot, it requires a great deal of attention to be seen. Thus, by a call for ‘semiotic subversion’, Zerubavel suggests ‘abnormalizing what we conventionally consider normal as well as normalizing what we conventionally consider abnormal’ (59), naming and foregrounding the unmarked to make it visible, and backgrounding the marked to normalise it, and doing so in academic, artistic, humoristic ways.

As the testimony of a process where Zerubavel saw his life habits challenged by Parkinson's disease, the book itself is a challenge of self-reflexivity toward taken-for-granted assumptions of the author. The book is rich in examples of the notions under discussion, and Zerubavel uses clear and comprehensible language. Readers interested in sociology of language will find in this work accessible ideas. This book would be useful for both social scientists and the general public with an interest in the normativity of language and the relationship between words and ideas. However, for readers already familiar with these arguments, the book remains introductory. The same examples are given several times even within the same chapter, the theoretical background would not appear deepened enough despite the multitude of references, and the subject is not sufficiently developed by analysis from the linguistic field to break new ground. This may be the result of his attempt to make the unmarked assumptions of everyday life marked by repetition.

Civil–Military Entanglements: Anthropological Perspectives Birgitte Refslund Sørensen and Eyal Ben-Ari (eds.), Oxford: Berghahn, 2019, ISBN: 978-1-78920-195-6, 324 pp., Hb £99.00.

Reviewed by Senem Kaptan

The study of militaries within the social sciences has long been the domain of political science and sociology, heavily marked by works that mostly analyse military and civilian worlds as distinct, macro-level realms. Birgitte Refslund Sørensen and Eyal Ben-Ari's edited volume is an invitation for an anthropological intervention into this field of study, urging for an analytical shift from the at times simplistic approach of civil–military relations to the more complex and nuanced civil–military entanglements.

The book's premise is not necessarily new. Scholars familiar with the intricacies of conducting research on and with the military institution and its members will realise early on in their research endeavours that civil–military relations entail a more complicated connection than a clear-cut divide between civilian and military worlds. The editors’ main contribution, rather, lies in giving us a theoretical framework to better name, describe, and understand the various intricacies of this relationship and in urging researchers to diversify the range of contexts and countries in which research on militaries is conducted.

Indeed, the strength of the book lies in analysing a wide array of cases across nine country contexts, which also extend into the transnational level, including Argentina, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Israel, Japan, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. The 12 chapters of the book are grouped into 4 thematic clusters that focus on: everyday life and intimate relations; public social space and civilians as consumers of military products; the relationship between state, citizens, and the military; and transnational military engagements. The book takes the study of militaries beyond the bounds of barracks alone and explores the topic through a range of locales, including private homes, public spaces of cities, popular culture, transnational security companies, and peacekeeping missions.

The strongest chapters of the volume, which also make for the most compelling read, are those that demonstrate and elaborate on the truly messy nature of civil–military entanglements—situations where the enmeshing of the two worlds produce complex social, political, and ethical repercussions and quandaries. In chapter 6, for instance, Taeko Uesugi explores how retired British Gurkhas (Nepalese soldiers) pose a challenge for the nation-state system by having fought on behalf of a country they were not citizens of. In chapter 8, Thomas Randrup Pedersen analyses how Danish soldiers stationed in Afghanistan manage combat duty as well as their self-perception as soldiers amidst increasing pressure to make military action compliant with the demands of military legal advisers. In chapter 9, through an exploration of Israeli military men who export security strategies to Kenya, Erella Grassiani demonstrates how military actions can build on, justify, and perpetuate racist and colonial discourses and policies.

As informative as it is to read about the diverse cases and histories of civil–military connections across the globe, this diversity alone does not make up for the book's two major shortcomings: a more thorough engagement with research process and methodology as well as in-depth ethnographic accounts. As aptly pointed out in chapter 12 by Nir Gazit, ‘since many anthropologists who study the military are civilians, the research process itself becomes an interesting example of a civil-military entanglement’ (251). Through his own experiences of cross-cultural research, studying the military as a ‘native anthropologist’ in Israel as well as a ‘foreign scholar’ in Canada and Spain, Gazit shows how ‘the researcher's social and personal identity…turns into an active ingredient in the production of knowledge’ (263). Despite this astute observation, it is surprising to see the general lack of discussion of research process and methodology, including how the researchers’ positionality may have impacted their access to as well as perception of and/or by their interlocutors, across the chapters.

In a similar manner, for a book that places anthropology front and centre in its title, the general lack of ethnographically grounded accounts from ‘the field’ is a noticeable absence. The chapters are mostly based on interviews, bolstered by historical research and cultural analysis without ‘thick descriptions’ based on extensive participant observation. In other words, the chapters lack a more tactile account of what each field site looks and feels like (with chapter 8 standing as an exception). Furthermore, the inclusion of interlocutor perspectives at times remains insufficient, with some chapters (e.g., chapter 5 on shifting perceptions of soldiers in Germany) standing as a missed opportunity to convey more direct voices. As such, with the absence of anthropology's fundamental premise of ‘being there’ across the book, it would be more apt to describe the contents of this volume as a cross-cultural qualitative study of the military that utilises anthropological theory instead of ethnographies.

Sørensen and Ben-Ari make a compelling case as to why the study of militaries warrant a central, rather than a peripheral, place within anthropological research. It would have been equally valuable to elaborate further on what additional value anthropologists could bring to the study of militaries aside from developing ‘innovative theoretical vocabularies’ (2) about our understanding of civil–military relations. Given that it is still macro-level studies, mostly emanating from political science, that impact policy debates and decision-making, how could anthropologists, whose strength is derived from nuancing the taken-for-granted big picture, more directly impact these discussions? This remains an under-explored topic within the book that could further enhance anthropology's unique contribution to the field.

Senem Kaptan

Rutgers University

Motor Vehicles, The Environment, and the Human Condition: Driving to Extinction Hans A. Baer, Lanham: Lexington, 2019, ISBN 978-1-7936-0488-0, 258 pp., Hb: £65.00.

Reviewed by David M.R. Orr

Restrictions on movement put in place in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic have given publics in many parts of the world a different perspective on mobility. One of the very few positive outcomes of this development was the fall in harmful emissions resulting from reduced motor vehicle use. In the United Kingdom, for example, air quality in many urban areas improved significantly during the lockdown period (BBC 2020). Many hope that the experience will give new impetus to societal efforts to move away from automobile dependency, mitigating its effects on the climate crisis and human health. Critical medical anthropologist Hans Baer's book, published several weeks before the virus started to make itself felt internationally, is a contribution to that movement.

Over the course of eight chapters, Baer brings together a sprawling literature, covering the political economy of automobility, cultural values associated with cars, the toll they exact on the environment and human health, and what alternatives might be envisioned to private vehicles’ continuing dominance of the transport imaginary. Chapter 1 explores the history of automobile production and the state-industry relations that made its trajectories possible in different parts of the world. Chapter 2 presents nine of what Baer calls ‘cultural tropes’ of automobility, by which he means the symbolism that cars hold in the popular imagination. He might more precisely have referred to ‘positive cultural tropes’, as the chapter focuses exclusively on the associations that the motor industry would be happy to endorse and has in fact spent enormous funds to promote. Critique, however, saturates the other chapters, not least chapter 3, which considers how automobility has shaped landscapes and settlement patterns, producing significant spatial, economic, and cultural patterns of exclusion.

Chapter 4 summarises the broader environmental impact of cars, spanning resource extraction, fuel production, air quality, contributions to climate change and disposal of materials; useful comparison is made with other forms of transport in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Chapter 5 discusses physical and mental health problems arising from automobility. A range of health conditions caused by automobility are addressed, with specific mention of musculo-skeletal conditions resulting from hours spent sitting in vehicles, prevalence of ‘road rage’ incidents, and even automobility as a vector of disease transmission. It is therefore surprising that injuries resulting from traffic ‘accidents’ are discussed only in terms of headline prevalence rates of mild and severe injuries without any more detailed examination. While Baer is doubtless concerned to demonstrate the ‘everyday’ harm caused by automobility rather than the so-called exceptional harms resulting from accidents, more detailed micro-analysis and/or reporting of statistical measures such as Disability Adjusted Life-Years would have helped to convey for the general reader the level of human suffering involved.

Chapter 6 presents four case studies of automobility growth and state support: Germany, Australia, Brazil, and Cuba. While interesting in themselves, I felt that more might have been done to make explicit the rationale for case study selection and pull out the lessons learned, thereby justifying Baer's repeated claims about the need for such studies; rather than providing this kind of synthesis, the chapter's conclusion plunges into entirely new discussion of experiences of automobility in African countries. Chapter 7 then looks at prospects for improving or moving beyond automobile use, while chapter 8 sets the changes he advocates for within the sustainable eco-socialist world system to which he aspires. The weighing-up of evidence for and against different mitigation measures is valuable in providing an overview of the various trade-offs, possibilities, and limitations inherent in such approaches as electric or driverless cars, or more public transport, and points towards Baer's conclusion that there are no panaceas to be found and that radical lifestyle changes are needed. Setting his horizons on a revolutionary eco-socialist world system leaves some of his proposed solutions rather sketchily thought-out within the space available: how would hitchhiking be revived in his more sustainable, trusting world (213) if vehicle use had been so radically reduced? Will gendered anxieties about safety when reliant on public transport be entirely allayed by reductions in capitalist inequalities (203), and in the meantime surely this remains an important issue that deserved more consideration? In fairness, however, this book provides an overview rather than a detailed policy plan, and Baer should not be condemned for engaging with the ‘big picture’ in which sustainable transport must fit.

Baer presents a panoply of numbers relating to the unrestrained growth of, and harms done by, automobility, though limited use is made of tables or charts to present this quantitative information. Although anthropologists’ ethnographic findings from the field feature, particularly in the discussion of cultural tropes, they remain supporting actors rather than main players in a text where the national, the global, and ultimately the prospects of human extinction, are the level of focus. The anthropological virtue of Baer's approach lies in efforts to keep a world-system perspective; although the United States dominates this global history of automobility, the distinctive experiences of other regions are also examined at most stages of the narrative.

Baer's passion and breadth of vision are not always matched by careful proofing, and errors such as the near-duplication of the same paragraph with identical quotes on pages 114 and 120, or confusing Miller's Car Cultures with Davison's Car Wars (135), are an occasional irritant. Overall, however, Baer provides an accessible and informative overview of an issue of vital importance to all. Already new findings are emerging that could have found their way into the book (e.g., recent studies on the contribution of road traffic to the microplastics pollution problem [Evangeliou et al. 2020]), and while there is passing mention of the 2003 SARS virus outbreak in China encouraging people to shift from public transport to private car travel, Baer could clearly not have foreseen COVID-19 and what lasting effects it may yet have on transport systems. Nevertheless, this work serves as a useful guide to how humanity arrived at its current situation of automobile dependence and sketches out many of the reasons why we will need to transcend it.

Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards, Oakland: University of California Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-5202-990-47, 230 pp., Pb. £25

Reviewed by Diana Jiménez Thomas R.

Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research is a powerful critique of ethnography for its epistemological silence about the impact of the body on the research process. Hanson and Richards poignantly show that ‘vocal silences’ around sexuality, gender, and race create important risks for researchers and, furthermore, detract validity from ethnographic knowledge by promoting homogenised and sanitised narratives of data collection. Dubbed ‘ethnographic fixations’, Hanson and Richards argue that a notion of ‘good ethnographic research’ which values or requires danger, solitude, and intimacy renders researchers vulnerable to sexual violence, especially researchers not fitting the white, cis, male profile that ethnographic practices have long assumed. The book provides powerful accounts of the pressure female researchers, from diverse backgrounds, face to be good researchers, and the related ‘worry they cannot do research the right way and stay safe at the same time’ (135). They argue, moreover, that these fixations erase the body from ethnography's epistemology, perpetuating a tradition of ‘disembodied ethnographies’ that edits sexuality, gender, and race out of publications and discussions. Hanson and Richards’ work is thus a call for an epistemological and methodological change in ethnographic research, to what they call ‘embodied ethnography’. This change, they argue, is crucial in order to break the silence that perpetuates risks for researchers, especially for women and women of colour. It is also necessary in order to move away from an androcentric, positivist, and colonial notion of validity towards a claim to feminist objectivity within ethnographic research.

The book contains five main chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the intersecting standards of danger, solitude, and intimacy for ethnographic research and their genealogies. Chapter 2 explores how the body shapes opportunities and limitations around access, trust, and rapport, and how female researchers have been encouraged to play disempowering roles in pursuit thereof, involving the performance of ignorance and inexperience. Chapter 3 discusses experiences of sexual harassment while doing research and the way in which academic practices perpetuate individualised and self-blaming perceptions of sexual violence. Chapter 4 examines the many emotional and academic costs that experiencing risk during data collection incurs for researchers. Chapter 5 argues for the unsettling of a positivist epistemology based on a mind–body dichotomy, and thus of the abandonment of disembodied accounts of ethnography that assume the neutrality of the body. Throughout chapters 2 to 4 the authors also provide practical suggestions and advice for researchers on how to avoid, navigate, and manage risk of sexual violence while conducting research. In the conclusion, Hanson and Richards suggest practical changes in the evaluative criteria used in the academic community.

Among many of the strengths of Hanson and Richards’ work is the attention they pay to gender, risk, and research sites. The book does not solely focus on women's experiences but rightly points out instead how all bodies affect research—albeit differently—showing that there is no such thing as neutral research and a neutral researcher. They advocate understanding risk as a product of positionality, which entails that research sites cannot be understood a priori as safe or dangerous, since doing so reproduces gendered and racial assumptions (among others) ‘about the safety and non-violent character of places like schools, the office and civil society’ (p.177).

However, Hanson and Richard's analysis has a few unfortunate gaps. Firstly, the book does not challenge the residual colonial premises behind conceptualising research sites as ‘the field’, and the ethical and epistemological implications this has. Secondly, existing literature on alternative ethnographic practices, briefly referenced in the conclusion, merits more attention that it is paid, as does further elaboration on how their proposal draws from, and adds to, feminist proposals of validity—especially Donna Haraway's ‘situated knowledges’ (1988). Thirdly, and most importantly, the book omits important discussions of the ethical dimensions of certain practices that instrumentalise research participants. For example, the book notes the commonplace and normalised understanding that ‘a sexual relationship is one of the best ways to become embedded and gather good data’ (84). There is no doubt this is detrimental advice to give researchers, especially female researchers, but it is also highly problematic for research participants, and yet the latter is not discussed.

Despite these shortcomings, Harassed is a book I wish had been available to me years ago when I was beginning my journey into fieldwork-based research. Hanson and Richards’ work would have equipped me with a much-needed understanding of issues which I have since faced around safety, harassment, and mobility, and their connection to the pressures I have felt to be a ‘good researcher’. The book is an essential read for any student and/or researcher using and/or teaching ethnography as a methodology, as it is a much-needed point of departure for a discussion about the roles of our bodies, gender, and sexuality in our interactions with other people and in the construction of ethnographic knowledge. Moreover, it is an essential read for anyone engaged in international development research as it complements calls within the wider research governance framework for increased safeguarding, accountability, and transparency (see Balch et al., 2020).

Diana Jiménez Thomas R.

Department of International Development, University of East Anglia

Tourism and Brexit: Travel, Borders and Identity Hazel Andrews (ed.), Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2021, ISBN: 978-1-84541-790-1. 244 pp.

Reviewed by Thomas M. Wilson

When I moved back to the United States for a new academic job in 2002, after a 12-year stint on the faculty of Queens University Belfast, I discovered that ‘applied anthropology’ was no longer the fifth subfield of American anthropology. I had missed the impact of the increasing tension between what might be loosely defined as academic versus applied anthropology, in which the former, while advocating the need to maintain a social and political relevance often associated with calls for a wider ‘public anthropology’, generally looks down on what are often seen to be theoretically deficient anthropological approaches to local, policy, applied, and activist matters. While few anthropologists anywhere would trumpet these approaches as mutually exclusive, mainstream anthropology today most often privileges public anthropology in terms of how it relates to theory, and not how anthropological theorising can help solve real-world problems that beset the people with whom anthropologists have studied and presumably shared research experiences. This disjuncture, which has led such organisations as the American Anthropological Association to assert that ‘anthropology matters’, a theme of one of its recent annual meetings, is ironic given that the everyday lives of people studied by anthropologists often reflect cataclysmic happenings as much as they demonstrate slow and cumulative change. Both sorts of change are represented in Britain's exit from the European Union. Dating back to the referendum in the United Kingdom in 2016, Brexit has long roots in the Thatcher years, and among many other effects has focused world attention on issues of borders and identity, the subject of Tourism and Brexit: Travel, Borders and Identity, edited by Hazel Andrews.

Anthropologist Tom Selwyn introduces this collection of 15 chapters with a wonderful foreword that in effect provides a better review of the volume's achievements than I might offer. He points out that while the editor has framed much of her own contributions around the anthropological mainstay of liminality, a core focus of border studies, Brexit provides a jarring alternative form of liminality. While liminality is most often seen as being between two states of the known, in Brexit it is a process of plunging ahead into the unknown, with no end point in sight. In essence, both Selwyn and volume editor Hazel Andrews provoke the reader to consider the possibility of Brexit as permanent liminality, and thus precarity, the exact opposite goal of those who voted to leave, many of whom sought to ‘take back control’ of British ‘borders, money and laws’ (xv) from what had been sold to them as an undemocratic European Union. Selwyn also concludes that this collection taken as a whole presents a ‘portrait of contemporary British society and culture’ marked by powerful forces of ‘fragmentation, fragility, displacement and detachment’ (xix), forces that have coalesced around the mythic and more concrete dimensions of Brexit, as experienced among various people in the United Kingdom, Europe, and beyond.

Although it may be a slight injustice to single out any particular chapter for praise in a uniformly well-argued collection that addresses the key themes of how Brexit, borders, mobility, and tourism intersect, some chapters should be seen as advancing anthropological perspectives on how matters related to national heritage, myth-making and tourism both support and subvert nationalism and European integration. For example, Andrews has two contributions, one on the narrative power of the notion of ‘freedom’ that plays at the heart of both tourism and Brexit, and another on how Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic intersect to provide new insight on changing aspects of identity and belonging in Europe. Vivian Gornik examines British national heritage as both symbol and commodity among British and visiting tourists, many of whom insist that a particular place must be associated with the mythic King Arthur despite the lack of evidence. Catherine Palmer explores Brexit as a ‘self-inflicted wound in the foundations of Britishness’ (38) that has revealed the reordering of identities in the United Kingdom. And while many of its analyses deal with the United Kingdom, the book offers equal time to how Brexit is changing notions of borders and tourism elsewhere in Europe, for example in the tourist industry in Poland, among British expats and tourists in Spain, and, in a refreshingly surprising turn, how Brexit affects British overseas territories, most notably Pitcairn Island.

While Tourism and Brexit is not strictly speaking a book on anthropological approaches to Brexit, its overall sensibilities and concerns, with issues of how policy, culture, heritage, identity and mobility affect, and are in turn affected by, tourism are decidedly anthropological in scope, largely due to Andrews’ deft editorship. This book, the best published so far in the slowly growing anthropology of Brexit, is an excellent example of how you can marry academic and applied approaches in anthropology, in ways that will matter not only to scholars in other disciplines but to the many other people seeking to understand Brexit as a significant global event.

Thomas M. Wilson

Binghamton University, State University of New York