Pavel Brunssen and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds) (2021), Football and Discrimination: Antisemitism and Beyond (London: Routledge), 218 pp, £104.00 (Hb), ISBN: 9780367356590.

This volume is the product of the conference The Beautiful Game: Identity, Resentment, and Discrimination in Football and Fan Cultures held in Berlin, Germany, in 2018. The core idea of the conference was that football stadiums are spaces of political discourse, and this volume is engaged with the theme by examining the reasons and causes of antisemitism in football to better understand discrimination in the sport and its social context.

The book unfolds with the first part, the Prologue, and the first chapter, ‘Collective Identity and Forms of Abuse and Discrimination in Football Fan Culture: A Case Study on Antisemitism’, written by Emma Poulton. In it, Poulton scrutinises the multi-faceted nature of discrimination in European, predominantly English, football. Her main conclusions are that football provides a distinct arena that affords a degree of legitimacy to multiple forms of discrimination, such as antisemitism. However, she also suggests that fans’ intentions are not always inherently discriminatory, necessitating a more nuanced analysis. Football fans’ expressions are, in her view, better understood as related to the expression of football rivalry and are not likely to be repeated outside of the cultural context of football.

The second part of the volume is entitled Ressentiment, and it consists of four articles. In the second book chapter, ‘The Image of the “Judenklub” in Interwar European Soccer: Myth or Reality?’ Rudolf Oswald analyses the new importance of football in European mass inter-war culture. He describes how being described as a Jewish club in that period evolved from being only a distinction marker to a derogatory slur and, ultimately, a symbol of existential threat. The third chapter, ‘The Sociopolitical Roots of Antisemitism among Football Fandom: The Real Absence and Imagined Presence of Jews in Polish Football’, is written by Jacek Burski and Wojciech Woźniak. The authors, based on their fieldwork research in Łódź, claim that the use of antisemitic slurs can only be understood in contemporary homogeneous Poland through reference to the uneasy heritage of multi-ethnic Poland. Florian Schubert wrote the fourth chapter, ‘Antisemitism in German Football since the 1980s’. In it, the author focusses on the persistence of antisemitism in German football since the 1980s, advocating for strong responses to prevent its seepage into broader social discourse. The fifth chapter, ‘Antisemitic Ressentiment-Communication Directed at RB Leipzig in German Football Fan Culture: The Third Other’, is written by Pavel Brunssen. In it, the author presents how antisemitic tropes were used against a football club whose fans neither identify as Jewish nor are addressed as such, thus revealing the nuanced layers of football fan culture.

The third part is entitled Identity and includes three chapters. The sixth chapter, ‘Self-Directed Racialised Humouverr as In-Group Marker among Migrant Players in a Professional Football Team: “Dude, Just Draw the Racist Card!”’, is written by Solvejg Wolfers. The author discusses whether racialised humour can be termed racist even if it is directed at your football group. She illustrates how using it simultaneously creates boundaries and solidarity amongst in-group members. In the seventh chapter, ‘Racism and Interethnic Conflict in Amateur Football: The Case of Migrant Sports Clubs in Germany’, Silvester Stahl presents complexities inherent in migrant sports clubs. On the one hand, they foster integration; on the other, they provoke conflict and discrimination. The eighth chapter, ‘Struggling to Belong in the Face of Otherness: The Atlanta Fútbol Club of Buenos Aires’, is written by Raanan Rein. The author uses a generational approach and shows how for the first generation of Jewish immigrants in Buenos Aires rooting for the Atlanta Fútbol Club was a way of improving integration into Argentinian society, while for their children it became an expression of Jewish identity.

The fourth part of the volume is entitled (Anti-)discrimination, and it includes four chapters. The ninth chapter, ‘Appealing to a Common Identity: The Case of Antisemitism in Dutch Football’, is written by Joram Verhoeven and Willem Wagenaar. They discuss the causes of antisemitism in Dutch football, ways of combatting it and the success of some used measures. Matthias Thoma and Martin Liepach, in the tenth chapter, entitled ‘Eintracht Frankfurt Fans and the Museum: Football History, Remembrance Culture, and the Fight Against Antisemitism’, present how carefully used politics of remembrance can serve to give a positive Jewish club history. The eleventh chapter, written by Andreas Kahrs and entitled ‘A Comment on Several Specific Aspects of Remembrance and Education Projects in Football’, is a personal account of work in various educational initiatives focussed on antiracist and anti-discriminatory programmes. Markus Gerke authors the twelfth chapter, ‘The Twofold American Exceptionalism in Soccer Fandom: Anti-Discriminatory Activism among Organised Soccer Supporters in the US’. In it, Gerke presents the exceptionality of the US soccer fan groups. Namely, they differ from other American Big Four sports fan groups and are all related to progressive politics.

The Epilogue is the fifth and final part of the volume and has only one chapter: ‘What Is about Association Football – the Arrogantly Self-Appointed “Beautiful Game” – That Renders Most (Though Not All) of Its Fan Cultures So Ugly?’. In it, Andrei S. Markovits emphasises how identity construction and in-group orientation of team sports and fan groups facilitate sports stadiums as arenas of discrimination. Other related cultural manifestations, such as masculinity and tribalism, nurture it, especially hegemony. Through this collection of articles, the editors and contributors give us valued insights, shedding light on the intricate ways in which discrimination intertwines with football. The volume has the potential to not only academically facilitate our understanding of discrimination in football but also to initiate impactful practices against it.

Goran-Pavel Šantek

University of Zagreb

E-mail: gpsantek@ffzg.hr

ORCID: 0000-0003-1232-5454

Francisco Martínez, Lili Di Puppo and Martin Demant Frederiksen (eds) (2021), Peripheral Methodologies: Unlearning, Not-Knowing and Ethnographic Limits (London: Routledge), 198 pp, £75.99 (hb), ISBN: 9781350173071.

If I were to compile a list about good things happening in our troubled times, I would definitely put the volume Peripheral Methodologies on that list. It is a book about things that are hard to explain, verbalise and communicate, about phenomena that slip through the neatly knit webs of orthodox methodological tools and representational techniques, the off-limits, abandoned or rarely visited territories of anthropological knowledge production.

In the Foreword, Paul Stoller recollects an event from Songhay fieldwork to forecast the merits and puzzlements of the anthologies’ endeavour. This is followed by the Introduction, a thick text of descriptive and more heated tones of a call.

Part one, The Suspension of Clarity, begins with Lili Di Puppo's beautiful chapter about a ‘beautiful failure’ (24), an episode of her fieldwork conducted on Sufism in the Volga-Ural region. In the reflective, personal, poetic, intentionally vague representation, Di Puppo means to transmit the intimacy of a mystery through textual means, claiming that ‘silence and unknowing are not absence or a lack; instead, they invite us to listen and acknowledge the limits of our knowledge’ (28), It is not only the post-Soviet field site that brings the next study by Martin Demant Frederiksen into proximity with Di Puppo's chapter, but rather the problems they highlight regarding rituals. While Di Puppo's study could be interpreted as a case in which the orthodox interpretative tools of anthropology cease to work, Frederiksen's study is critical of the mainstream models of rituals for ‘getting it a little too right’ (32). With the in-depth account of a young Georgian man's wedding gift, he suggests that rather than ‘analytically carving out what the meaning of the meaningless’ (39) is, it might be a legitimate approach for the anthropologist to leave a veil of uncertainty regarding the intentions of human actions. The following chapter by Sevasti-Melissa Nolas and Christos Varvantakis on children's everyday lives lightly draws a parallel between the parenting model of ‘considerable adult investment of time, concern and thought’ (46) and that of the attentive researcher. The study challenges the latter by recollecting field experiences in which they shortly and suddenly lost themselves in their past memories. They argue that such cases of inattentiveness open up human relations, unmask the researcher as a person with a biography, and open the somewhat underscored bodily ways of knowing, ‘a full engagement with the textures, tastes and sounds of the sensorium’ (56).

Opening the next section of Unlearning, Lydia Maria Arentes's chapter introduces the very peculiar problem of the researcher knowing the research topic too well, of being in ‘a body that appeared to know too much’ (64). Besides recounting instances which enabled the author to distance herself from her own pre-existing knowledge, the chapter unveils knowledge on how the researcher's subjectivity unfolds during different phases and instances of researching and being, and also through the creation and revision of different mediums. The body is also a pivotal part of the ethnographer's toolkit in the following chapter, in which Ewa Klekot sheds light upon the complexity of the seemingly banal act of centring the clay on the potter's wheel. Out of this small lump of clay, a theoretically formulated, elegantly presented argument leads us back to the very roots of Western ideas, to fundamental ontological and epistemological questions of categorising and evaluating the different kinds and sources of knowledges. A form of knowledge which is ‘bodily, situated, alien to any abstraction, normalisation, scalability, or universalisation’ (90), Klekot elaborates what mētis, this ‘crafty intelligence’ (90) is in the narrower context of making pottery and in the wider context of sensing, coping and living. Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff's chapter, based on her long-term apprenticeship in a coppersmith's workshop in Mexico, takes a critical approach when it comes to touching the political character of the maker's corporeality and materiality, and, probably more importantly, when it comes to the concept of flow. According to the author, flow ‘ignores its ambiguous and peripheral substrates’ (100) and ‘freezes the body into idealised perfection’ (101), but the whole metaphor behind flow ‘ignores the artisan's ways of comprehending variety, spatial extension, blockages’ (102).

The third part, Absence of Knowledge, begins with the chapter written by Karen Waltorp and the ARTlife Film Collective. The paper brings forth some of the events of a collaborative film project and touches on issues of how the different roles are negated and performed and how this collaborative work is defined and redefined during the many stages of creation. One answer to these challenges does not only resonate with the previous problems but can also probably serve as generally appliable advice: ‘Knowledge generated with people in earlier fieldwork should not stand in the way of listening closely, listening anew’ (124). The following chapter by Kirsten Marie Raahauge connects the two seemingly distant fields of a former urban centre and the experiences of haunted houses with the position of the anthropologist. As we follow this entangled narrative in which notions simultaneously describe the field and its worker, Raahauge broaches several epistemological problems, most importantly how abstraction could be a way of ‘explaining away the concrete phenomena’ (141). The two key terms of the chapter – ‘loss of control’ and ‘defocused gaze’ – could be understood as a solution to the raised problems, of letting go of preset approaches and categories. A story of (accidental) becoming, Francisco Martínez's text revisits his past (pre-)professional experiences in Georgia, occurrences of unfollowed paths and missed opportunities. Busting myths and reflecting on such field topoi as friendship, the author rather unconventionally describes fieldwork as ‘a journey that goes from knowing to not-knowing, gathering new questions in your pocket and challenging the preestablished significance and meanings of things’ (156).

The three parts are tied together by a concluding chapter, which revisits, reinterprets and reframes the studies, It is followed by an afterword by Robert Desjarlais, which takes us back to a seemingly distant path of peripherality, to the world-wide unknown of the coronavirus.

One of the great merits of the book that it is really a book, not just a collection of studies pushed under an umbrella term. It tells a story, in which researchers coming from the field of different sub-disciplines do not moor at the safe port of a specific research tool but set sail on a vast ocean of pre-existing methodological knowledge towards the wider horizon of ethnographic knowledge creation to discover something new.

Throughout the book, many authors play with paradoxes. I am referring to such ideas as the potentiality of vagueness being more authentic than clarity (Di Puppo), as fitting descriptions being unfitting (Frederiksen), as understanding by not listening (Nolas and Varvantakis), as gaining knowledge through unlearning (Arantes, Klekot, Feder-Nadoff), as seeing more clearly through a defocussed gaze (Raahauge), or as learning from something unlearnt (Martínez). Meditating upon these could be an enlightening experience, and these twists of plot certainly add to the value of the volume.

However, there is one paradox that should not be left to the reader to resolve: how does the transformation of the personal, the intimate, the mystical, etc. into commodified academic achievements challenges ‘late-modern paradigms of innovation and the need for everything to be useful’ (5) and ‘the neoliberalisation of academia’? (4). In my reading, this out-of-context, critical part of the Introduction stands out from the whole book, a good book, which does not try to forcefully follow the dark, critical path of anthropology. It looks at friendship, home, childcare, making, revelations and co-operating, and delivers soft, nuanced, clever, self-reflective, eye-opening analysis. A good book for better times? Maybe. A good book for a better anthropology? Definitely.

Áron Bakos

Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

E-mail: aron.bakos@ubbcluj.ro

ORCID: 0009-0002-9348-9564

Gérald Gaillard (2022), Françoise Héritier (New York: Berghahn Books), 193 pp, £107 (Hb), ISBN: 978-1-80073-334-3

The ‘world anthropology’ movement has increased interest in researchers who have contributed significantly to the discipline in their own countries but are little known or even unknown outside of their countries. This is precisely the case with Françoise Héritier (1933–2017). Although she succeeded Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France, only two of her books have been translated into English (The Sweetness of Life and Two Sisters and Their Mother: The Anthropology of Incest). Her work has not become the subject of international debate in anthropology, although, as the book under review shows, it should. French ethnology did not help either. It is significant that Robert Deliège (2006), in his history of anthropology, does not mention her at all. However, in his work on structural anthropology (Deliège 2001), he devoted a few pages of a separate sub-section to her.

The book, written by a distinguished historian of anthropology and Africanist Gérald Gaillard, is a concise scholarly biography of Françoise Héritier and is another valuable contribution to Berghahn Books’ Anthropology's Ancestors series.

Françoise Héritier was a French anthropologist known for her significant contributions to structural anthropology, gender, and kinship studies. She was influenced by the structuralist approach developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss. However, she was not a researcher humbly following her master but rather one that critically drew on his achievements. But the list of people, scientific inspirations and events that have shaped her as a researcher and public figure is long. The book under review discusses different influences in great detail.

This enumeration of influences already begins in the Preface, the writing of which, not coincidentally, was entrusted to one of the pioneers of women's history research, Michelle Perrot. As she notes, Héritier extended her anthropological insights beyond academia, to civic roles. Her chairmanship at the National Council for HIV from 1989 to 1994 showcased her dedication to issues arising from the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Her leadership at the council addressed concerns like insurance discrimination against HIV patients, prison inmate confidentiality, drug-related infections and media representations of HIV. Under her guidance, policy decisions were firmly rooted in scientific approaches and anthropological perspectives.

Additionally, Héritier focussed on gender issues, examining the roots and manifestations of male dominance and emphasising the transformative power of birth control for women. While she gave a unique intellectual dimension to feminism, she also recognised the slow-paced challenge of achieving gender equality, expressing support for movements like #MeToo. Héritier's work was fundamentally aimed at reshaping our understanding of gender hierarchies. The following chapters, , sticking, as far as possible, to chronological order, show the path of her scientific development and gradually increasing social involvement.

The first two chapters are dedicated to the early life and education of Françoise Héritier, which eventually led her to anthropology and kinship studies. It is shown that some key French scholars (M. Izard, C. Lévi-Strauss, G. Balandier, amongst others) and her personal and professional trajectories intertwined. The latter also intertwined with the political and colonial landscapes of the time, shedding light on their experiences, contributions and the broader changes in French academia and governance. The reader will find that the political context (the Algerian War, the spring of 1968, the consecutive ‘Republics’ in France, the various right and left movements, etc.) was significant at every stage of her scientific life. The reasons for taking up work in Upper Volta, the specific role of computational methods of analysis, and George Murdock's HRAF (Human Relations Area Files) in the first period of her scholarly work are also explained.

The following chapters recount her career and experiences. Her primary work was on the Samo people. Unique amongst ethnographers, Héritier described her fieldwork conditions, showcasing the challenges and privileges of her role. She lived among the Samo, participating in rituals typically closed to women and even taking on a nursing role, greatly influencing her rapport with the community. Her main focus was kinship and marriage regulations. She aimed to identify marriage prohibitions using a genealogical survey to create a statistical marriage model. She focussed on the choice of spouse, endogamy and the mechanisms that allow small communities to navigate increasing matrimonial prohibitions.

At this point, I must make a critical remark. Given that this is a scholarly biography of a particular researcher, I find it unnecessary to cite existing kinship theories in too much detail, especially concerning cultural contexts other than the one studied by Héritier. Discussing the kinship systems and terminology of the Iroquois, Hawaiians or Crow-Omaha only makes sense with the latter, as the system is similar to the Samo people she studied. Similarly, information on political events that were extremely important and ground-breaking in the history of modern France, which appeared from time to time, seemed to have little to do with the researcher's work, particularly during the 1968 rebellion, when Izard and Héritier were in Upper Volta. There is an indirect link between the processes set in motion by these events and Héritier's work, particularly concerning the emerging feminist issue; the author could have kept the contextual information to a minimum, and the reader would have found it easier to concentrate on the book's main thread.

The last three chapters of the book are dedicated to her works on ‘differential valence of the sexes’ and gender dynamics, her public activism and her feminist advocacy. In 1965, Héritier was appointed to the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, and a few years later, she became increasingly involved in public affairs. Her work on Samo kinship structures led her to the discovery of institutionalised ‘female solidarity’ and the ‘differential valence of the sexes’, signifying the value hierarchy between genders, with the masculine being dominant. She distinguished the latter from ‘male domination’ and believed that differential valence is rooted in social structures, the sexual division of labour and recognised forms of stable sexual unions.

After her retirement, she became more involved in the public discourse concerning human rights, gender inequality, migration and the problems of academia itself. She sought to demonstrate that empowering women and dissolving gender inequalities depend on control over women's reproductive rights. She believed that the legalisation of contraception was an accidental blow to traditional male power structures. At the same time, she critiqued the argument that women's status is a cultural and traditional matter that Western nations should not interfere with. She emphasised the fact that this notion of cultural relativism, often used to justify the denial of rights to women, is a fallacy, as the subjugation of women is a universally shared cultural trait. Héritier emphasised the importance of universal human rights and intercultural understanding, rejecting cultural absolutism.

In summary, the book thoroughly introduces the main strands of Françoise Héritier's work and public activity. The chronological structure of the narrative makes it possible to trace the evolution of her scientific views and the factors that led to changes in her methods, areas of research and public engagement. Given the relevance of the scholar's achievements, it seems incomprehensible that so little is known about her outside of France. Hopefully, this book will remedy this situation.

Marcin Brocki

Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology

Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

E-mail: marcin.brocki@uj.edu.pl

ORCID: 0000-0003-3703-9761

Iliana Sarafian (2023), Contesting Moralities: Roma Identities, State and Kinship (New York: Berghahn Books), 144 pp, $135/£99 (Hb), ISBN: 978-1-80073-906-2, ISBN eBook: 978-1-80073-907-9, £23.95.

The book by Iliana Serafian (anthropologist from the London School of Economics and Political Science, ethnically a Bulgarian Roma) is published as the fifth in the series New Direction in Romani Studies edited by Huub van Baar (Leuven University) and Angéla Kóczé (Central European University). The book represents a new and progressive way of writing about the Roma – critical Romani studies. This new direction is also represented by the periodical of the same name (Journal of Critical Romani Studies),¹ where texts about Roma are written mainly by Romani scholars or with their participation. One of the aims of this direction is to remove the stigma from Roma scholarship.

The book is based on the author's field research in two unspecified and anonymised Bulgarian city neighbourhoods: she spent six months in a Romani quarter named ‘Radost’ (1,300 Roma live there) and after eight months in a bigger town in the book named ‘Sastipe’, where 3,000 Roma live in two different parts (mahalas) of one quarter – the Upper and the Lower part – originally based on the ‘differentiation of ethnic but mostly religiously homogenous neighbourhoods’ (5) but today also on economic access (6).

The aim of the book is to present the knowledge about family lives of Roma in both neighbourhoods, including questions about childcare and education, about ‘Roma elite’, and about womanhood and adulthood (7). As the author underlines, in each of the chapters there are many ‘examples of how kinship opposes the state’ by creating ‘alternative narratives and forms of morality, history identity and belonging’ (8). Her goal was not to describe ‘rules and traditions’ as usual Roma ethnographies do, but to watch ‘possibilities and impossibilities of planning a future, creating or unmaking a community, . . . agency, socioeconomic survival’, etc. (8).

The book is divided into the Introduction, six chapters and the Conclusion. It includes a table of contents, twelve illustrations (a selection from the author's own collection of family historical photos), a bibliography and a name index and a subject index.

Throughout the text, passages from observations and their reflection interwoven with memories from the author's own life alternate with each other. For example, there is a story of Milena, who died because the emergency service refused to go to the Roma quarter to fetch her. This happened even though she had serious birth-related complications – luckily, the baby survived. As the author writes, Milena's story ‘remained firmly anchored in my memory’ (10).

The result is a text combining different methods of analysis, including auto-ethnography, which adds to the quality of the text. The author gradually changes her attitude towards her own identity and towards the identity and ethnicity of her informants (from Turner's ‘neither here, nor there’ [see Turner 1967] to Said's ‘no one today is purely one thing’ [see Said 1993]), though she notes she was influenced by many other authors too (11–13). She emphasised the existence of ‘complex of heterogeneity and difference in subgroup identity’ (13) as well as hegemonic powers of various kinds of agents who construe the Roma identity and pressure Romani individuals to accept these views – though it is based on ‘the lens of poverty, precariousness and concept of underclass’ (14). The special agent is the state, conceptualised as an autonomous agent which produces morality and the rules. The responsibility of this agent is seen as crucial, especially if the state's presence is brutal or absent, when children are labelled by institutions as coming from ‘inadequate families’ (15–16), and also when including different regimes when the memories are analysed (related to both socialism and post-socialism [17]). Kinship is very important, as it strongly influences the life of each individual in Romani families, and without including this perspective the analysis would be difficult to understand.

The first chapter deals with methodology and theoretical framing, and the second one is primarily about the sharing of inter-generational family history and the transmission of individual memories (combined also with archival research); it presents different types of narration – that is, about the history of where the families came from and about their members’ weddings, births and funerals. The third chapter discusses the differences between the morality of the state (school facilities, the social system) and the morality of kinship, as Roma children are educated in these systems with different moral conceptions. The fourth chapter looks at the ‘hyperreal’ vis-à-vis the ‘everyday Roma’, and it looks at the crucial topics of identity and activism. The fifth chapter is about home (and how the state regulates it). The last chapter is about ‘gendered strategies’, and it describes again the differences between the two moralities mentioned above (kinship and the state), but it also includes a discussion of individual morality and emphasises the different positions of men and women, their unequal status in Romani families and how the status of Romani women has changed during the author's lifetime. Special attention is paid to child marriage, which was rare during socialism, but which happens more often today.

The book is an extraordinary anthropological contribution, offering a story about the journey and search for identity of the author and the residents of Romani neighbourhoods. Of special importance are ethical questions connected with Roma identity that have come to the fore in recent decades and that have been examined through field research with participant observation, questioning the life histories and narratives of these participants, through the studying of theories, and through self-reflection. All of this leads the author to better understand and redefine her own view of ‘Roma-ness’ (o Romipen / o Romimo / o Romanipen [13]). The chapters can also be read separately, and not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the book – each relays to the reader its own clear message.

Lada Viková

University of Pardubice, Czech Republic

E-mail: lada.vikova@upce.cz

ORCID: 0000-0002-6173-3190

Freddy Foks (2023), Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (Oakland: University of California Press), 263 pp, £30.00 (pb), ISBN: 9780520390331.

Freddy Foks writes a lateral history of British anthropology in this valuable monograph, showing its place in broader British intellectual culture. He concurs that anthropology was a colonial subject but asserts that the discipline needed the empire more than the empire needed the discipline. For Foks, anthropology's most crucial contribution was to imagine society and culture as a whole way of life.

He argues that in the early twentieth century anthropology transformed from a museum-based study of human races to a university-based study of native customs. Foks credits Malinowski, and to a lesser extent Radcliffe-Brown, with the invention of the social. They were both challenged earlier diffusionist theories, based on the analysis of artefacts. Malinowski sought to represent the native point of view and show how economic institutions, such as kula exchange, interlocked with custom and prestige.

The 1920s saw a drastic increase in university staff and in academic training for leadership in the empire. Steamships forged connections between Britain, Australia and South Africa. In this context, Malinowski used Rockefeller Foundation money to sponsor anthropological research throughout Africa. With Lord Lugard, he advocated reformist colonial policies based on indirect rule, and he opposed Leo Amery's conservative government, which advocated white settlement in East Africa. Anthropologists generally repudiated the civilising mission. Evans-Pritchard argued that ‘superstitions’, such as witchcraft, should be viewed as part of a cultural whole. Read contended that Africans used cattle ritually to reproduce society and warned against attempts to force them to raise cattle for the common market.

Foks sees that Malinowski's seminars at the London School of Economics were a key space for defining anthropological theories. Correspondence by air mail kept him in touch with researchers in the field and the researchers with each other. Though they were increasingly drawn into the social world of research participants, anthropologists had to contend with the colour bar and raised the suspicions of colonial authorities. Foks acknowledges that not many students endorsed Malinowski's brand of applied research, but I feel that he does not fully capture Malinowski's unpopularity amongst them.

Ironically, the professionalisation of anthropology led to its declining relevance in colonial relations. At home, Malinowski's writings on sex and marriage did impact public debates about family planning and women's sexual autonomy. He challenged the view that the father's authority stood at the centre of the family and extolled the merits of individual parenting over collective child-raising. Anthropologists also helped interpret the British urban milieu in new ways. Firth and his students revealed the existence of various kinship types in Bermondsey, London. Willmott and Young described Bethnal Green as a working-class village in the heart of London marked by dense kinship networks. Bott explored how kinship networks dispersed over the urban landscape. The central message of these studies was that social engineering should follow the contours of family life.

Lord Haley's 1940 Africa Survey, which promoted a technical approach to improving lives in the colonies, facilitated involvement by anthropologists in colonial development and welfare. Malinowski's students used government funding to establish research centres in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Uganda, Nigeria and Jamaica. Whilst some did applied research, others followed Radcliffe-Brown in pursuing basic research on social structure and political systems. Gluckman and his colleagues at the Rhodes Livingston Institute and Manchester University brought innovations such as situational analysis and were more openly critical of colonial rule.

During the 1960s, post-colonial governments turned to development economics. Concepts of modernisation and growth replaced an emphasis on the social, and statistics became more powerful than ethnographic representations. Anthropologists now filled in blank spaces in economic models, or criticised top-down development projects. For example, Deane showed that concepts of ‘economic activity’ did not capture what Zambians did to feed, clothe and house themselves. Anthropology also proved valuable for understanding Britain's past, as evident in Thomas and Thompson's histories of industrialisation and modernity.

Foks celebrates anthropology's resilience. In recent years, sociology has proven more popular amongst British undergraduates, and fieldworkers can no longer take their epistemic authority for granted. But anthropologists continue to study fragmented problems on a small scale, through the lenses of hermeneutics, feminism and post-colonial theory.

Foks writes with great skill, distinguishes himself as a meticulous researcher and greatly advances our understanding of the contexts that shaped British anthropology. But national disciplinary histories do have limitations and make it hard to capture transnational influences. For example, Radcliffe-Brown's Australian National Research Council programme between 1926 and 1931 served as a model for subsequent collaborative research projects. Concerns, such as segregation in South Africa, also profoundly shaped cosmopolitan theory. I nonetheless found only one mistake. Winifred Hoernlé was not based at the University of Cape Town. She taught social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Isak Niehaus

Brunel University, London

E-mail: isak.niehaus@brunel.ac.uk

ORCID: 0000-0002-9573-0238

Patrícia Ferraz de Matos (2023), Anthropology, Nationalism and Colonialism: Mendes Correia and the Porto School of Anthropology, translated by Ana Pinto Mendes (New York: Berghahn Books), xv +378 pp, $145 (Hb), ISBN: 9781800738751.

The present volume is an important contribution to the history of anthropology, written by one of the most important Portuguese anthropologists in recent years. Portugal is home to a number of prominent anthropologists, whose work became more visible to the public outside the Lusophone sphere after 1990, but also, with its colonial legacy (much longer and more profound than the one in countries like Germany, for example), to one of the very important anthropological traditions – especially if one considers the task of anthropology as being to look at and try to understand the ‘other’. Patricia Ferraz de Matos's outstanding contribution is also a continuation of the important work about the history of anthropology – as done by her compatriots João Leal, João de Pina-Cabral and Frederico Delgado Rosa. In the Portuguese language, Brazilian anthropologists were studied by Mariza Peirano and a specific ‘anthropology of anthropology’ (Peirano 1981).

Ferraz de Matos's book is different in scope and intent because it emphasises a specific (colonial) context – not something that many scholars feel comfortable with doing. The book is a product of extensive archival research and interviews, and it focusses on the influence of António Augusto Esteves Mendes Correia (1888–1960), a natural scientist with training in biology, who was soon after completing his studies in Porto drawn to anthropology (22–25). He wrote on a variety of topics including psychology, criminal justice (‘criminal anthropology’), ‘social hygiene’, eugenics and education, and served on different important state committees related to archaeology, ethnology and other topics. He was also the founder of what he called the ‘Porto School of Anthropology’ (A Escola Antropológica Portuense), and this volume is dedicated to the influence that this ‘school’ had on the country's understanding of its colonial others.

In the first chapter, the author introduces biographical information about Mendes Correia. He started teaching as a junior lecturer at the University of Porto in 1911. Even after appointment as professor of anthropology in 1921, he was until 1928 also responsible for various other chairs – Geography of Portugal, Portuguese Colonial Geography, Political and Economic Geography, General Geography, Ethnology, Archaeology, Ethnography, and General Anthropogeography. The second chapter deals with the Porto School and the institutionalisation of Portuguese anthropology. The interest in the study of ‘folk traditions’ seems to have been a key factor for the development of the discipline in Portugal (51). The author sees the beginnings of anthropology in her country from the 1870s (57), and traces its development and the different influences it had on the formation of the SPAE (Portuguese Society of Anthropology and Ethnology) all the way to 1918. However, the anthropology degree was incorporated into university curricula in the country only in 1974. As Ferraz de Matos sums it up, referring to the specific school that she presents in the book: ‘In Porto, we found an anthropology with a naturalist and physical character that prevailed in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and that also existed in Great Britain and the United States, combined with an anthropology that stimulated sociocultural studies, in the country and in the colonies’ (84).

The third chapter presents an overview of Mendes Correia's research. His interest in medicine (the topic of his undergraduate degree thesis) with psychiatry, as well as in ‘criminal anthropology’, according to the author, ‘garnered his interest in anthropology, and he saw criminal anthropology as one of the practical uses of anthropology’ (92). Therefore, he formulated anthropology as both a natural science and a human science, striving for ‘a full understanding of Man in its structuring and expression of an inorganic, biologic, psychological and spiritual order, in the individual and, mainly, in human groupings’ (92–93). Ferraz de Matos presents his understanding of the subject as it can be discerned from his course outlines, as well as his readings of the history of anthropology (with the importance that he attributed to the society established by Louis Broca in Paris in 1859) and his understanding of creationism and evolution. Mendes Correia advocated the position that ‘sought to create a compatibility between the Church's doctrine and evolutionist ideas’ (104). On the other hand, he and his disciples were very important for insisting on the importance of studying primates, so ‘they would be later quoted by most important figures in physical anthropology and primatology in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and France’ (109).

The fourth chapter presents a range of possible applications of anthropology – from studying ‘deviation’ to different aspects of ‘population policy’ (which included, amongst other things, Mendes Correia's strong prejudice against women [198]) to eugenics to colonial anthropology. When discussing the Portuguese colonial project in Africa and the uneasy relationship between colonialism and anthropology in a wider context, Ferraz de Matos quotes with approval Talal Asad (1973), whose book focusses only on some British anthropologists. The views presented by other anthropologists, like Herbert Lewis (2014), offer a very different perspective. When discussing the case study of Portugal and its colonies, she notes that ‘it is perhaps more correct to say that anthropology, as an emerging science, was not at the service of colonialism, but that it increased its action contemporaneously’ (207). The fifth chapter looks at the political legacy – Mendes Correia not only promoted different educational and research institutions but was also involved in different political roles (including Mayor of Porto) and held different important advisory positions for the local and state authorities. However, he remained a scientist in the first place, as his ‘political interventions mainly reflected his scientific and nationalist interests’ (295).

In the Conclusion, after summarising some of the main arguments of her study, Ferraz de Matos also points to the development of anthropology in Portugal after 1960. Her main goal can be summarised as enriching ‘the discussion of the various pasts of anthropology . . . those of nationalism and colonialism’ (328). This book is certainly a welcome addition to this field of study, and it will be appreciated both by anthropologists and readers interested in the history of the human sciences.

Aleksandar Boskovik

E-mail: aleksandarbos@gmail.com

ORCID: 0000-0002-5411-6848