Muehlebach, Andrea, 2023. A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. xvi +252 pp. ISBN 978147801831

Despite recognizing the pitfalls of water privatizations in the Global South, international development institutions continue to call on capital to play a more active and profound role in water infrastructure investment and service delivery (e.g., World Bank 2023). Such powerful currents of water privatization and financialization have nonetheless faced significant citizen and community group resistance to enclosures of the water commons that deliver actual or potential threats to basic water access for life. Questions that resurface in late capitalist dynamics are whether, how, and where the state might re-enter provision of vital infrastructure and other assurances of human and ecological life.

Andrea Muehlebach's comparative ethnography is a significant critical examination of diverse attempts to capture and liberate water in Europe, and the water movements which she argues, reimagine the frontiers of the political in the early twenty-first century. In the broadest sense, the book joins an increasing number of anthropological works which have found that water is the very essence of a contemporary politics of life. In a revealing contribution to this literature, the book examines in three European nations what has long been reported from global capitalism's “peripheries”—that commodification of the planetary elements happens in many guises, and capital and colonial accumulation and dispossession operates by generating ever-new frontiers of capture.

In each of the four substantial chapters, Muehlebach deftly argues that attention to the material dynamics of water reveals best how attempts at enclosures by the global financial frontier are contested by diverse sets of actors. Water, itself a “charismatic protagonist” (9), is both infinite and leaky, superseding abstract value through symbolic vitalities and religious meanings. In Italy, ethnographic attention is brought to small-town residents’ refusals of the financialization of civic spring water through descriptions of fountains as well as the marches that forefront the role of the mayoral banners and crests (chapter 1), and through an examination of “crazy bills” sent to them by water companies (chapter 4). In Ireland (chapter 2), a social movement forms around the rejection of company installation of water meters, and in Germany, the water battle plays out in courts, in bureaucratic documents associated with Berlin's water utility, and in mundane and slow revelatory tactics of the documentary form of the contract (chapter 3). In the short epilogue, we are in France, where bringing water back to local government or cooperative control (“remunicipalization”) is one of the many uncertain but hopeful victories delivered by water movements. Each water movement articulates a refusal of the idea that the very substance of life may be reducible to abstract financial value.

We are shown that water movements are “vitalist,” not only in how they center life as the principal value of water but also because the financialization of water is never complete. Muehlebach argues for a kind of dialectic, detailing capitalist attempts to achieve stabilization of financial value or abstract price and resistance actions by water movements, which assert counter values and meanings, grounding the politics and value of water in local actions and emplaced life. The state outsources authority over a public good to financial investors, sells off infrastructure to transnational companies or enters into public–private partnerships that fail to make a profit, and, with the work of water movements, sometimes reverses forms of privatization. In Italy, the commodification of spring waters through the centralization of water management and de-democratization in the name of efficiency, previously the purview of municipalities, generated a movement centered on popular, and very local, sovereignty. In Ireland, struggles against infrastructure capture were imagined as part of the decolonial struggles against Britain, a form of resource sovereignty that recenters the public good of water in people's homes.

The “financial frontier” for Muehlebach is, like other frontiers, a zone of law creation, and so it is also a site for a close material analysis of contracts, bills, referenda, taxes, and meters. In Germany legal activists from the “Water Table” occupy and reveal obscure deals between government and finance over water infrastructure, popularizing and visibilizing contractual documents, thereby making ex- plicit a connection between participatory democratic values and the value of water as a public good. In Germany, too, Muehlebach is attentive to the grammar of the conditional perfect in legal contracts (111), which in Italy's bills is a “predatory future perfect” (145), and both syntactic registers function as licit forms for extracting profits of the future from the present. If water constitutes the local, is indexical of the local, then the frontier of its financialization by capital is multiple, rapacious, and recursive.

Considered as an analysis of water's value and water values, the book shows how water movements in Europe do not simply reject the idea of water having a price, or contest financialization on the basis that water should be free. Instead, the different movements the author details insist on a materialization of water value that centers water as a public good and service. This is a logic that relies on the redistribution of costs from different sectors and fair pricing, ensuring equitable access and making water subject to the stewardship of public institutions or cooperative management. In this, and the epilogue that weighs up the political economic limitations and potentials that are resurgent with remunicipalization, Muehlebach's work is a deft examination on the questions of the state in late capitalist Europe.

As a celebratory ethnography of the sometimes-invisible victories of coalitions and networks of creative movements that meet the actors and acts of financialization at its frontiers, and in doing so insist on life, this work demonstrates how commodifications of water may be prevented or reinvented. Each of the chapters is rich with detail, with illustrations including images of flyers, photographs, and political posters. It is a work that brims with the joy of ethnographic connection between the universal and multiple material of water and the diverse human expressions of water's value to life.

Sally Babidge

The University of Queensland

Dansac, Yael and Jean Chamel, eds., 2023. Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 259 pp. ISBN 9783031102936

With the current turn toward more-than- human interlocutors in anthropology, it is no surprise that a focus on more-than-human co-becoming through rituality has come for- ward. The edited volume, Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World, by Yael Dansac and Jean Chamel draws together nine ethnographic encounters to address this topic, with an introduction by the editors and an afterword by Michael Houseman.

Dansac and Chamel's introduction analyzes how humans overcome the persistent divide between nature and culture through rituals formed with and alongside more-than-humans. The choice in the book's title to use “with” rather than “to” underscores the equal agency in ritualized acts between more-than-humans and humans. Here we find what could have been a problem for the book: varying definitions of “ritual.” The authors explain that their use of the term varies and draws from emic understandings to reflect the variability of rituals. In his chapter, Chamel also reminds us of the powerful embodiment that can be inherent in ritual acts when they reflect a bodily way of knowing, as the rituals he observed taking place at legal conferences for the rights of nature might teach. He offers the example of a water ceremony performed at the Earth Rights Conference in Sweden in May 2019. A bowl of water from Lake Vättern was present for a mock trial that found the Swedish state guilty of violating its rights. At the end of the trial, participants were invited to come forward, touch the water of the lake, and touch the water to their foreheads. Variations ensued, and for each person, these ritualized actions reflected the embodiment of their beliefs, the recognition that the water and the person were connected.

The short and dynamic chapters that make up the volume take the reader across the world. The volume's first part explores the use of daily rituals performed by more-than-humans and humans together. Théophile Johnson analyzes the agency that Nepalese herders and yaks retain in domestication processes; Cyndy Margarita Garcia-Weyandt describes the maintenance of kinship relationships between Wixárika families and Tatéi Niwestskia (“Our Mother Corn”) in Mexico through daily ritual interactions of the families with maize; Bertrande Galfré analyzes how French peasants cooperate with agricultural organisms.

Part two examines the political implications of ritualized interactions between more-than-humans and humans. Anna Varfolomeeva de- scribes how for Okans of Siberia mining is a part of their identity and not just a reflection of economic and political relationships; Degenhart Brown analyzes the use of animal ingredients in rituals in Togo and the Republic of Bénin; Jean Chamel discusses the ritualistic ways in which rights of nature activists attempt to reestablish relationships with non- human beings.

Part three describes the spiritual engagements of humans with more-than-humans. Ed Lord and Henrik Ohlsson re-evaluate the classic ritual studies terms of liminality and communitas; Yael Dansac extends this discussion of liminality, describing the rituals performed with megaliths of north-western France; Tenno Teidearu demonstrates the con- tinuous relationalities between crystals and Estonian women.

All of the chapters could stand on their own without losing clarity, which perhaps calls into question the use of collecting them together here. However, Houseman's afterword puts each piece back in conversation with the others in interesting and poignant ways, and in the end I think the reader benefits from seeing these works in a handily comparable way.

A major strength of this volume is the use of ethnographic work to center human connection with a wide variety of the more-than-human. Additionally, the chapters avoid the trap of narrowing human relations with others to charismatic megafauna, in which only the hyper-visible, adorable large animals receive attention from the international conservation community while the less cute but equally important and valuable species go extinct without notice.

That being said, I find that the volume, as with many more-than-human ethnographies before it, fails to extend the agency of its definition to the hard to live with more-than- human. As Dansac and Chamel explain, the use of “more-than-human” rather than “non-human” is meant to destabilize the in- herent anthropocentrism of the classification; yet the ethnographies presented only apply this term to the more-than-humans living positively or at least neutrally with humans. Nowhere do they acknowledge the rituals created to live with the messy, potentially dangerous more-than-human. Rituals with these non-humans do exist (see work by Caylynn Dowler and Donna Haraway) but there is no recognition of them here. Dansac's examples come close in that rituals allow the otherwise neutral megaliths to provide positive cooperation with human counterparts through the rituals enacted by humans. But I continue to be interested in what allows community to form with the hostile more-than-human, if it can form at all. What does it mean to expand the understanding of more-than-human be- yond the easy-to-live-with examples presented in this volume and toward something like weather and climate, or even climate change itself? Does the more-than-human include a hurricane? I believe that it can, and that folding it into our definition could have incredible implications for what it means to live with, make community with, and yes, ritualize with more-than-humans.

Returning to the strongest points of the volume overall, the chapters engage the established canon of ritualization (referencing Bell, Douglas, and Descola along with Durkheim, van Gennep, Goffman, and Asad, among many others) without becoming a ritual re- view textbook, and the strong ethnographic works apply these multiple theories of ritualization in tangible, teachable ways. While the volume avoids becoming a dry textbook, it does clearly and practically demonstrate and build on the ritual theory canon.

In conclusion, I find Relating with More-than-Humans to be an interesting and enjoyable read and a useful review of current work being done with more-than-humans. I think it could be a good addition to an upper-level course teaching contemporary ritualization in a globalized world. I will be interested to read further work by these authors in the future.

Abigail Beckham

University of Connecticut

Boyer, Dominic. No More Fossils. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 96 pp. ISBN 978-1-4529-7021-9

Dominic Boyer's little, 81-page, book No More Fossils offers both a thought-provoking read on the historical entanglements of fossil fuels with modern civilization and a passionate call to action for unmaking the “fossil gerontocracy” that imperils our collective future. Through a blend of personal reflection, cultural analysis, and political manifesto, Boyer traces the evolution of how deeply fossil fuels have shaped, not only human energy systems but also our very habits of thought and action. The book's great strength lies in its dual ability to poignantly reveal our profound entrenchment in fossil fuel culture while still offering a vision of hope grounded in the potential for collective action and “revolutionary infrastructure.”

Boyer begins with an engaging piece of childhood memory, encountering fossils at Indiana Dunes State Park in family vacations while growing up in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s. He uses this encounter as evocative lens into humanity's long-standing fascination with fossils—first as an object of mythological imagination and geological inquiry, then as a form of combustible subsurface energy resources. Charting contemporary sci- entific accounts emphasizing the rarity and contingency of fossilization, Boyer introduces his central argument: that our civilization has become fossilized through its dependence on fossil fuels. The cultural forms generated by fossil fuels are poorly adapted for continued duration on earth (8).

Boyer proceeds to offer a concise yet illuminating history of the rise of “fossil fuel civilization” through the development and en- tanglement of three major fossil fuel regimes—sucropolitics (sugar), carbopolitics (coal), and petropolitics (oil). He traces how each new regime absorbed and extended certain logics of its predecessor while developing its own distinctive qualities and means of world-making. Sucropolitics originated with colonial Caribbean sugar plantations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These plantations, Boyer argues, pioneered modes of industrialized agriculture, machinic production, and racialized labor exploitation that would profoundly shape the emergence of European modernity, liberal philosophy, and eventually global capitalism itself (11–22).

The rise of coal-powered industry in nineteenth-century Europe marked the transition to “carbopolitics,” an era defined by the explosive growth of industrial capitalism, thermodynamic science, and a cultural ethos of productivity and mastery over nature (24–32). Boyer deftly shows how carbopolitics was eventually absorbed into the “petropolitics” of the twentieth century, as oil displaced coal as the dominant energy source, enabling the rise of automobility, suburbanization, and the petrochemical industry. The “ultradeep petroleum culture” of postwar America, epitomized by plastics, came to infiltrate nearly every aspect of modern life (32–41).

One of the book's key insights is that we now live ensnared by “sucrofossils, carbofossils, petrofossils”—the accumulated sediment of prior fossil regimes (41). Boyer elaborates this point in one of the book's strongest chapters, “Fossil Gerontocracy, or What Sticks Us Where We Are.” He identifies three mutually reinforcing layers of “fossil gerontocracy”: the “petrostate” (the deep symbiotic relationship between fossil fuel interests and political power structures), “petrohabits” (the social routines of constant mobility, consumption and energy expenditure), and “petroknowledge” (the fluid domain of media narratives and discourse that overwhelmingly affirm petroculture even while seeming to critique it) (49–66). Together, these three layers constitute a “fossil gerontocracy”—an aging, rigid system determined to preserve itself at all costs. Like the sclerotic leadership of the late Soviet Union, today's petro-elites myopically work to maintain current norms and forms even as the ecocidal consequences become undeniable.

Crucially, Boyer insists this apparent intransigence belies the fundamental precarity of fossilized cultural forms. In his final chapter, he pivots to the question of “what is to be done” to enable a post-fossil future. Boyer calls for a “decompositional politics” that rejects false technical fixes, takes aim at the petrostate as the primary target, and seeks to break petrohabits through a mix of direct action, lifestyle changes, and rediscovery of low-carbon pleasures (74–77). He introduces rain gardens as an example of the “revolutionary infrastructures” he proposes—diverse, locally-attuned projects that enable new relations and trajectories outside of fossil fuel-based systems (72). Boyer's vision is unapologetically radical yet also pragmatic and hopeful. He urges finding motivation in the “epic times we live in” that is “gifted the necessity of making a new civilization” (81). While some readers may find his visions utopian, one leaves the book energized by Boyer's insistence on the possibilities for revolutionary change even in the face of daunting odds.

With its accessible prose, interdisciplinary scope, and provocative arguments, No More Fossils would make an excellent addition to undergraduate or graduate syllabi in environmental studies, energy humanities, political ecology, and related fields. The book's short length and engaging style make it well-suited for courses across a wide range of disciplines, while its ambitious historical and theoretical claims provide ample discussion fodder. In particular, Boyer's “fossil gerontocracy” framework offers a generative tool for students to analyze the cultural and political dimensions of climate crisis and energy transition in a variety of contexts.

Ultimately, No More Fossils makes a stirring contribution to the growing field of energy humanities. As fossil fuel interests continue to impede energy transition at every turn, Boyer makes a compelling case for the necessity of cultural analysis in understanding the roots of our predicament and imagining alternate futures. The book's urgent yet ultimately hopeful message deserves wide readership among scholars, activists, and citizens alike. As Boyer closes, “Anxiety is rising because there is so much to fear. . . . But, take a breath, because fear is a poor compass. . . . Instead of despairing at the many sleepers around you, take heart from the fact that even an oil executive back in 1901 couldn't comprehend that the whole world was on the cusp of massive change” (81). In suggesting that we may now stand at the threshold of another epochal shift, this time toward a post-fossil future, Boyer invites us to grapple with the profound cultural and political transformations necessary to usher in this new era. While the precise shape of this future remains uncertain, No More Fossils offers a timely and thought-provoking catalyst for the collective imagination and action required to bring it into being.

Chen Shen

Stanford University

Bresnihan, Patrick and Naomi Millner. 2023. All We Want Is the Earth: Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism. Bristol: Bristol University Press. 194 pp. ISBN: 978-1529218336

This book offers a critical historiography of global environmentalism, questioning the erasure of particular social movements from environmentalist narratives and rewriting them with such movements at the center. By including stories of activists who did not self-describe as environmentalists but whose work had strong connections to environmental concerns—for example, struggles over land, labor, and decolonization—the authors aim to construct a more inclusive framework for advocating just and sustainable futures.

The first substantive chapter focuses on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, or, more accurately, the context surrounding it. Understanding how migrant farmworkers advocated against pesticide use in California or Mexican farmers resisted the Green Revolution can help explain why Carson's work had such impact. Foregrounding these grassroots movements also decenters scientific work as the heroic primary agent in subsequent changemaking. This intervention resists the whiteness of environmentalist historiography by insisting on the pre-existing activism of racialized and marginalized voices. It asks whose voice is remembered in this narrative and why.

Moving on a decade, the second case study starts with the thinking of Barbara Ward, who advocated for global cooperation to manage the “fragile orb” more sustainably. This chapter offers a critique of what is termed “one-worldism”: the universalizing tendency to imagine the globe as a shared physical space for a unified community, waxing and waning between 1968 and the mid-1970s. This contrasts to the radical anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and Third-Worldist movements of the same period, which also posited transnational efforts at collective action to bring about more sustainable and just futures. While the concerns and activities of such alternative movements are well-articulated, this chapter feels a little incomplete in its execution. At the beginning, when discussing the eclipsing of these perspectives by environmental one-worldism, the authors assert that it is “vital we observe how this happened, and what becomes lost when these wider movements and claims become disassociated” (56). In outlining the contributions of such movements, the authors certainly achieve the latter objective, but the question of how they came to be erased by dominant narratives is left unanswered in the text.

The third case study focuses on the late 1980s and early 1990s, an era in which global environmental governance adopted a neoliberal framework of “sustainable development.” The authors characterize this move as an active depoliticization of environmental concerns and their reformulation as a set of technical and governance issues for market actors and civil society. This is situated in the context of three alternative movements: La Via Campesina, the Zapatistas, and the Ogoni people. The chapter traces how these movements resisted neoliberal forms of globalization and enclosure and also creatively forged their own forms of transnational solidarity and practices of commoning, making use of new media and international humanitarian and activist networks to share knowledge and resources and to articulate counter-narratives to dominant modernist environmentalism.

The final historical moment under consideration is the beginning of the twenty-first century and its emergent forms of “earth politics.” In contrast to the universalizing environmental politics of the Anthropocene with its reliance on statistical geosciences, this chapter documents the increasing articulation of an indigenous earthly politics which decenters the human and pluralizes the world instead of seeking to unify it into a singular model. Examining examples of permaculture in El Salvador and the activism surrounding Standing Rock, the authors present “earth politics” as a bottom-up critique of global environmentalism that emphasizes the relationship between colonialism and climate change as well as attending to other forms of knowledge, modernity, and ontology.

The book is laid out in a way that is illuminating for those familiar with the well-worn debates of environmental politics but also instructive for those less well-versed. The opening chapter offers a clear and comprehensive resumé of global environmentalism and its discontents. Boxes describe key concepts such as “denaturalising environmentalism” (referring to theoretical movements critiquing the nature-culture binary) or delve into complicated histories or other topics, such as the connections between pesticide de- velopment and infrastructures of war. These enable better-versed readers to move on without interrupting the narrative flow to rehearse foundational concepts and also make the arguments accessible to others. This addition makes it particularly well suited to inclusion in reading lists for introductory courses.

Each of four case study chapters is followed by an “interlude,” the first two of which are creative and compelling juxtapositions of images from popular media with historical vignettes. For example, the first interlude contrasts chemical company advertisements with images of resistance against fossil fuel or chemical companies. These visual essays are open-ended and emotionally impactful, evoking the texture of life in chemical modernity. They complement the preceding chapters by visualizing their core tensions, achieved particularly effectively in the second interlude which explores iconic images of the unified globe in “Western” imaginations and beyond. The third interlude, taking the form of an ethnographic vignette and some subsequent discussion, achieves this less fully. The loose structure of the interludes and argument-by-juxtaposition is less suited to text and feels more unfinished than open-ended. Similarly, the fourth interlude, a series of short descriptions of four projects that have inspired the book, would be stronger with more interpretive framing. This latter interlude also describes these projects as being carried out by artists, which is somewhat confusing given that one of the projects is an anti-colonial marine science laboratory.

Major strengths are accessibility and at- tention to the aesthetics of global environmentalisms, as well as commitment to recognizing that these histories are unfinished, still-unfolding stories. Late in the book, readers encounter the term “resonance” as a way to understand how different agendas might collaborate across a diversity of perspectives. Applying an acoustic term that describes sym- pathetic vibration of objects to social movements usefully evokes how aspects of disparate struggles can amplify each other without unifying them into sameness. The concept points to how we might conceive of movements beyond environmentalism as relevant to socioenvironmental struggle. As a central theory of the authors’ historiography, it is strange that it is only mentioned for the first time close to the end. Nonetheless, it captures the feeling of the argument being expressed, and All We Want Is The Earth proves an insightful and constructive intervention into environmental politics.

Cormac Cleary

Dublin City University

Sahlins, Marshall, with Frederick B Henry, Jr. 2022. The New Science of the Enchanted Universe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 196 pp. ISBN 978-06912115921

Marshall Sahlins’ posthumously published The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (2022) is an ambitious effort to reorient what he calls the “transcendentalism” of Western social science by means of richly detailed attention to the many “cultures of immanence” that exist all over the world. Unlike those cultures that have played a leading role in shaping the intellectual heritage of the West, cultures of immanence have long recognized the spirit, power, agency, and causal forces at work in non-human beings—from stones and rivers to ancestors, ghosts, and plants. Sahlins’ argument, in simplest terms, is that most of humanity lives (and has historically lived) in a thoroughly enchanted universe in which humans are actively aware of their dependence on other-than-human forces and beings who must be continuously invoked, propitiated, appeased, or otherwise engaged. What this lack of “enchantment” in much of the West has meant—and continues to mean for how we produce academic theory and the many conceptual blindnesses it creates—is the subject of this strangely provocative book.

To advance this argument, Sahlins assembles an impressive compendium of ethnographic data from all over the world. Moving from Boas’ accounts of how Kwakiutl woodcarvers call upon “spirit-powers” to ensure the excellence of their creations to Philippe Descola's more recent descriptions of Achuar engagements with the goddess of cultivation, Sahlins argues that anthropologists have too often misunderstood, flattened, or rendered excessively utilitarian the ontological worlds inhabited by these cultures. However, the problem is not just with anthropologists. Indeed, in his view, social scientists more broadly remain engaged in interpretive practices that are deeply marred by the conceptual legacies and inadequacies of the axial ideologies, and by Christianity in particular, which he sees as primarily responsible for the evacuation of the “sacred” from the so-called “material” world. The theoretical implications of this evacuation are far-reaching—from anthropologists who “reduce the meaningful relations of [cultures of immanence] to the status of convenient fantasies” or “fictional representation[s]” (11) to foundational social scientists like Marx and Durkheim who understand religion as little more than a “misplaced recognition of the power of [human] society” (12). In Sahlins’ view, these “axial” or “transcendentalist” approaches deform our interpretative capacities, as we become less and less attuned to the agential aliveness of the many other-than-human beings with whom cultures of immanence have long been intimately engaged.

In each of the four chapters, Sahlins traces the implications of this agential complexity for both anthropological theory and the so- cial sciences more broadly. He begins by high- lighting how cultures of immanence understand human finitude, recognizing that—unlike how they are conceived in much of the West—humans in these societies are seen as incomplete, radically dependent on forces outside of themselves, and only ever partially the makers of their own inventions and destinies. In chapter 2, simply titled “Immanence,” he considers the precise range of beings on which humans are dependent, pushing against the Christian distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” (and the related categorical distinctions between “spiritual and material, nature and culture, reality and belief”), which have no place in social systems where “ancestors, gods, the inua or spirit of things, and other such metapersons are immanent presences in human lives” (37). Juxtaposing the narrowly tripartite Christian God with the spiritual multiplicity of these metapersons, chapter 3 delves into the nature and function of these beings, while the concluding chapter, “The Cosmic Polity,” explores the hierarchies that structure the relationships between these beings even in societies that have historically been interpreted as “egalitarian.” This last chapter is particularly important for Sahlins’ argument that this richly agential world of other-than-human beings cannot be understood as a mere projection or reflection of existing social structures, as suggested by scholars influenced by Durkheim.

In some ways, this is a classically anthropological book—seeking to defamiliarize transcendentalist patterns of thought by taking with the utmost seriousness the diversity of the ontological worlds inhabited by cultures of immanence. It does so in a way that is often theoretically scintillating and always ethnographically rich. However, it is also a book that, despite Sahlins’ aspirations (which are nothing less than to “revolutionize an obsolete anthropology!”)—is not, in the end, particularly novel. After all, we have long lamented the disenchantment of capitalist modernity; proponents of the ontological turn have for at least two decades been clarifying the ontological stakes of not taking seriously enough the realities (not just the worldviews) of cultures that regularly interact with the more-than-human world; believers in “radical alterity” have long sought to explicate the realities of (not just beliefs about) non-human personhood; environmental anthropologists have long attacked the notion of “Nature” for being reductionist and universalizing; and scholars of new materialism have been writing about the agential power of the material world since at least the turn of the last century.

Just because the book is not revolutionary, at least not to this reader, does not make it uninteresting. Indeed, it is full of fascinating observations that push against received anthropological wisdom about the place and purpose of ritual, the nature of non-human personhood, and the connections (and disconnections) between social and ideational structures. It also encourages nuanced re- readings of classic texts, a revival of theoretical ambition across the discipline, a renewed recognition of the power of generalization across cultural contexts, and a rethinking of some of the foundational interpretive moves of the founders of Western social science. While the book may not affect a “Copernican revolution” in anthropology, its offers much to think with as climate change and ecological degradation proceed at breakneck speed and scholars from within and beyond anthropology scramble to explore other ways of imagining and relating to more-than-human beings. Sahlins has clearly laid out the problematic for us. What remains for the rest of us, now that he is no longer here to take up the work, is to consider how not just a culture but a politics of “immanence” might (or might not) change the socio-ecological collision course on which we currently find ourselves.

Erin Fitz-Henry

University of Melbourne

Helmreich, Stephan, 2023. A Book of Waves. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 411 pp. ISBN 978-1478020417

In this book, stemming from Stephan Helmreich's extensive research on waves, the author shows that the field of anthropology of science has evolved beyond studying cultures within specific scientific domains. It now en- compasses the behaviors and methodologies of scientists themselves. A Book of Waves ex- pands on work Helmreich initially presented as a Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture in 2014 and explores the potential of applying anthropological inquiry to non-human entities, using waves as a case study. It demonstrates how understanding complex material phenomena like waves requires abstraction, thus broadening anthropological investigation beyond human subjects and challenging established boundaries. By examining the cultural foundations of abstraction, the book prompts us to reconsider the human elements within these constructs—their origins and potential transformations.

Refusing to confine himself to a physical world devoid of significance, Stephan Helmreich utilizes waves to challenge and counter recent calls in cultural theory to focus solely on materiality. In doing so, he embarks on a resourceful anthropological exploration that extends beyond ethnography, incorporating various tools and specific domains of human knowledge such as epistemology, the history of science, and art, coupled with a genuine passion for the sea. This endeavor includes a rebellion against the conventional monographic form. Instead of presenting a linear narrative detailing his ethnographic journey to understand human perceptions of waves, the author offers ethnographic chapters interspersed with shorter pieces. Analogous to interstitial water on a sandy beach, these shorter pieces, akin to waves, intervene between closely spaced chapters, traveling in sets as indicated in the table of contents.

In the first chapter, the author delves into the enduring relationship between Dutch cul- ture and the sea, examining the dynamics among dikes, dams, waves, and floods. During his time in the Netherlands, he explores the Waterloopkundig Laboratorium, where engineers use wave-generating machines to model water flow and wave behavior. Additionally, he participates in a flood-preparedness exercise organized by municipal authorities in Market. Through these experiences, the author uncovers how Dutch perceptions of waves are intertwined with archaeological and ritual practices aimed at combating and conquering them. The chapter highlights the anthropomorphization of waves, as they are endowed with human-like qualities such as bodies, lives, stories, and even gender, intersected by the influences of race and colonialism.

Chapter 2 delves into the author's experience aboard UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography's FLIP, a retired but functional 355-foot-long oceanographic research platform that can be flipped 90 degrees to submerge 300 feet underwater. It explores the intertwined history of military interests and the origins of modern oceanography, with a focus on Scripps scientists’ significant contributions. While military influence persists, contemporary oceanographic research em- phasizes ecology and addressing human im- pacts. The chapter also examines scientists’ diverse interests, including bodysurfing, mu- sic, and cognition in outer-space exploration. However, it acknowledges the colonial and developmentalist history of wave studies on the West Coast, linking it with the expansion of the US Pacific Fleet. Finally, it presents evidence suggesting that we recognize, explore, and interpret outer space as sound waves be- cause wave research has influenced our questioning methods and therefore impacted audio monitoring technologies.

Chapter 3 revisits a conversation between the author and prominent physical oceanographer Walter Munk, highlighting their agreement on the inability of mathematical abstractions to predict coastal wave behavior accurately. It describes fieldwork at Oregon State University's O. H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory. Here, scientists translate textbook theories into practical experiments, shaping animated watery mediums within specially designed tanks. The shared geological origin between the east (America) and west (Asia) of the northern Pacific presents similar oceanographic challenges, particularly in tsunami preparedness. Following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Japanese decision-makers have prioritized constructing coastal walls based on worst-case scenarios. Balancing this defensive approach with preserving the traditional connection between Japanese fishers and their seascape requires constant negotiation. The set of waves in this chapter embodies artistic and computerized wave representations and a simile between monitored human blood flow and oceanographic remote sensing, which arises from both phenomena occurring in waves.

Chapters 4 and 5 stand out for their seamless integration within the book's narrative. The former offers an ethnographic exploration of computer-enabled monitoring and modeling of waves, emphasizing the importance of considering demographic and cultural factors in understanding the real impacts and overlooked vulnerabilities of communities affected by changing coastlines. This perspective is reinforced by examples in the fourth wave set, which include monitoring human rights violations in the Mediterranean, the pursuit of clean energy from wave action, and the metaphorical use of waves to describe social trends. In contrast, In chapter 5, attention turns to wave sciences in the Global South, where colonial legacies and economic interventions intersect with blue economy projects. These projects aim to profit from altering coastlines while addressing rising sea levels. However, they present inhabitants with the dilemma of either embracing external development plans for their coastlines or reexamining their own understanding of oceans and waves to navigate an uncertain future.

As emphasized in the postscript, A Book of Waves encourages readers to delve into discussions on the material aspects of waves and the methods to capture them, offering insight into human responsibility for climate change. It serves as a tool to comprehend today's climatological and political shifts as oceanic and social processes increasingly intersect. Analogous to the transformation of swells into well-defined waves returning to the sea through rip currents, Stephan Helmreich skillfully employs various interpretations of waves—encompassing natural, cultural, and temporal dimensions—to deepen readers’ un- derstanding of human nature, viewed through the lens of anthropology extending beyond humans.

Nemer E. Narchi

El Colegio de Michoacán

Russo, Joseph C. 2023. Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

“All hidden kingdoms have their thresholds,” Joseph C. Russo begins, and so we are led into the world of Southeast Texas (SE Texas) through hard-luck stories, strange temporalities, piney woods, flat horizons of illusion and suspension, and a vibrant “catalog of feelings” accumulating in a place of stuckness and severity (2, 6). In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain, Russo carefully attends to this genre of Texan storytelling and the characters that dwell in and tell these tales—stories that the author describes as exhibiting “a stuckness, a suspension of action,” and which seem to play with, deploy, and muddle “the great mythological stagnancy of the American South and its inhabitants” (4). Russo offers a powerful study of regionality, a scalar and spatial realm not always well attended to, and we see in his repetition of “SE Texas,” a clear insistence that there is something specific to be understood here.

This attention materializes partly because of the region's specific character—what Russo refers to as “the severe forms of life” pro- duced through the conditions of a “fester[ing]” economy—but also partly because of how the region lives in the “outside” American imagination, as a charged place of “industry's ex- cesses, of anti-Black terror, of remote and feral rurality” (4, 6–8). Here, the ethnographic tradition is troubled by Russo's attention to these proximate figures, these “near-Others” who, as the author suggests, test anthropology's cherishing of difference. His focus on these subjects elicits doubt from a wider anthropological public about whether research on “such people” can bring about anything but “soiled knowledge” (7–8). This is a question that is further weighted by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which occurs a few months after Russo leaves SE Texas and shapes the period in which the book is composed, seeming to yoke the stories and characters to concerns with a contemporary “national wound” (39). Russo's deft and delicate handling of hard-luck stories and their telling reveals the author's mode of abundant listening and surfaces a social ecology of “life [that] flickers on in intense ways”—an atmosphere of severity in which the lines between the fictive and real, between metaphor and reality, are generatively tangled (11).

In chapter 1, “The Strange Time of Hard-Luck Stories,” Russo examines the different temporalities contained in stories shared in an RV park in Beaumont where he lives for a time; in stories of “characters” from a trailer park, relayed almost entirely by an interlocutor he calls “the landlord”; and in stories that circulated about anti-Black violence in Vidor and the messages of time and affect that were implied, depending on who did the telling. The temporal setting is not always fixed or clear in hard-luck stories, Russo finds, and this blurriness performs the type of repetition and impasse that hangs in the air, that haunts and suffuses the scene.

In chapter 2, “The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God,” we come to Texan religiosity largely through the supplements department of a health food store where Russo works part-time, encountering the particular, intricate, and at times surprising beliefs that the other employees hold and espouse. Narrative and language play commanding roles in these religious practices—for evangelical and Messianic Jews in particular—valorizing a kind of literalism, of reaching truth through unmediated closeness to words and text. We hear again here the resonances in Russo's attention to storytelling, and it offers a frame through which to approach the formation and expression of these beliefs. As a publicly practiced form, Russo identifies religion in SE Texas as displaying a “pull between play and seriousness” in the aesthetic and affective dimensions of religious adherence. He probes the severe “intensities” that can form through the religious sincerity that swirls above and below the surface (49).

Chapter 3, “Queer Character and the Golden Triangle,” traces stories of being queer, from mostly men, in SE Texas. Russo here examines how experiences of inhabiting, leaving, and returning to one's hometown question the more conventional binaries found in LGBTQ+ politics, as well as the assumptions of pain, on the one hand, or redemption, on the other, of queer rurality. Russo describes the experiences of being queer in the region as a shared wound for some, but also sets these people as “not separate from the world that caused their pain” (80). Hopeful anticipation is not the temporal affect that tints these stories. Rather, the ecology of stuckness and suspension asks what are the unexpected and confounding ways in which we see the “enmeshment of the queer self in the regional scene” (88).

Chapter 4, “Ringing Out,” is the final and most intimate chapter, and is inclusive of Russo's concluding moments. Here, the somatic and the narrative meet in the bodily experiences, knowledges, and stories of cancer—cancer understood to be emerging from the toxic detritus of industry and felt keenly “in the air” (99). Stories Russo hears in the cancer ward in Beaumont feature themes of suspicion and skepticism, channeled toward both the petrochemical and healthcare industries, as well as toward state inclination to “sacrifice” the region in the mode of the “necropastoral” (102, citing McSweeney 2014). Russo links the experience of cancer to people's devotion to casinos, which itself is approached not as something to diagnose but as suggesting a “shared feeling” that Russo attempts to “tune into” (110). The book comes to an end with Deb, to whom it is also dedicated. She has endured countless radiation and chemotherapy treatments and more, and we now see more clearly her place in Russo's social world. At the doorstep of her home, a cat “rip[s]” apart “a blood-red male cardinal” which dies at the same moment that Deb does. Russo says, “It was the last bird I ever saw in Kirbyville” (115). His writing becomes most vivid, luminous, and haunting, to me, in these final pages and perhaps that is also the force of Deb's life at work.

Hard Luck and Heavy Rain is not an ecological story in the classically environmental sense. The use of “social ecology,” Russo indicates, follows Gregory Bateson and others as the intertwining of sociality and ecological forms, and for Russo's writing specifically, of stories, characters, and places (3, 11). Though I waited for the titular “heavy rain” to make itself known in the book, I came to understand that rain was more a condition of accrual here than of eventfulness. Russo's attunement to the region and descriptive richness, his vocabulary of suspension and impasse, bring about a sense of place and environment that is both full and compelling.

Stephanie Ratté

Columbia University

Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa. 2023. Dare to Invent the Future: Knowledge in the Service of and through Problem-Solving. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 388 pp. ISBN 9780262546867

Recent works toward decolonization have argued that Western Eurocentric knowledge reifies exploitative and ecocidal pursuits. Clapperton Mavhunga's Dare to Invent the Future presents such an argument from a slightly different angle than the current academic vogue. Rather than reciting the evils of colonial-capitalism, Mavhunga's book is framed as a pan-African challenge (or dare!) for the continent to produce better knowledge. When Mahvunga asks, “Why do we know?” His an- swer is, “To solve problems” (4).

Mavhunga laments that in Africa, “little to none of the knowledge learned in class is applied—even applicable—to everyday activities and problems” (1). From this departure, the book offers an interesting cocktail of science and technology studies, African history, and polemical vitriol. Divided in three sections, the book starts with a history of Black philosophy and epistemology, then reviews applied Black knowledge in African revolu- tionary movements, and ends with an examination of efforts to operationalize Black educational institutions.

Mavhunga's diagnosis and prescription for institutional learning is multi-pronged. He endorses entrepreneurial risk-taking as well as the pragmatic incrementalism of figures like Booker T. Washington. Mavhunga laments that Africans are educated to be employees, not innovators; that test questions rehash Eurocolonial discoveries; and syllabi reflect European values, not knowledge useful for Africans. At the same time, he admonishes impractical ivory tower theorizing of scholars comfortable in European humanities departments. Mavhunga explicitly attacks “knowledge for its own sake” (266), dismissing “biopolitics and nonhuman agency” as unable to improve African lives (280).

Mavhunga's opposition to both programmatic technical knowledge and theoretical critique amounts to an advocacy for what I would call “Applied Humanities.” Mahvunga wants “thinker-doers” to do more than “just install and repair” (4) foreign inventions. This approach offers the enticing prospect of reading Fanon and Wynter as epistemic engineers wherein science, engineering, and humanities “forge a new covenant for solving Africa's problems” (307). The epistemic histories of Africa offered in the book aim to present “History in service of problem-solving” (147).

Afropessimist critiques of Eurocolonial knowledge in recent decades (e.g., Frank Wil- derson, Robin Kelley, Katherine McKittrick, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Calvin Warren, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson) advance a common warning: if we do not produce different kinds of knowledge, we are doomed; doomed to continue living in an anti-black world and, inseparably, doomed to continue the past few centuries of ecological evisceration. Mav- hunga seems sympathetic to this imperative, but his perspective differs.

While extensively engaging with the works of Césaire, Fanon, Cabral, and Wynter, Mahvunga doesn't throw out the baby (European science and technology) with “the dirty bathwater (slavery and theft of black inventions)” (213). Whereas for authors like Warren, Eurowestern knowledge is irredeemably toxified with anti-blackness, Mavhunga seeks knowledge that is applicable, not pure. He returns to Cabral's sentiment that people are not fighting for ideas in their head but for actual material gains (139). That is, unlike Césaire who explicitly calls for the end of this world (“Begin what? The only thing in the world that's worth beginning: The End of the World”), Mavhunga is happy to recycle and reinvent Western engineering and draw inspiration from Greek and Roman classics. Indeed, he portrays the ability to adopt, adapt, and re-envision European technologies as one of Africa's greatest epistemic virtues—no technology “arrives to them as technology a priori, but only becomes so in view of their strategic deployments” (104).

In this pursuit, Mahvunga grabs useful knowledge from figures with “complicated” reputations. From Washington to former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, Mavhunga advocates drawing from any epistemic strategies that could tangibly improve lives. Relatedly, Mavhunga is not as stringently anti-capitalist as many contemporary social theorists. This is a departure from what readers may expect from publishers like MIT Press or Duke University Press, whose titles often point to ruthless privatized profit-maximization and exploitative economic relations as underlying much of the world's ills. While there's plenty of critique of colonialism, Mavhunga is willing to consider capitalist solutions. Solutions are solutions after all, even if they are in the service of profit. No knowledge is out of bounds if it can be put to work in improving the material conditions of Black lives.

This is a densely packed book offering wide-reaching historical vignettes about guerilla healthcare practices in Zimbabwe, the hijacking of Algerian radiowaves, and thick descriptions of the Tuskegee Institute. However, for readers of Environment and Society, there is not a sustained consideration of the relationship between epistemic priorities and environmental engagement. For some, discussions of epistemic reform are inherently about (preventing) climate crises since dominant forms of knowledge production authorize (if not valorize) habitat destruction and exploitation. Along these lines, Mavhunga invokes Thomas Sankara: “the struggle to defend the trees and forests is above all a struggle against imperialism” (278). Implicitly then, normalizing Eurocolonial knowledge fuels ecological instability, and new knowledge is necessary for cultivating sustainable environmental relationships. Mavhunga alludes to this, pointing out that “our university system is apocalyptic” (314).

Mavhunga's voice is bold—“Academics are letting Africa down. We are teaching and producing useless knowledge” (324). Perhaps such forthright admonitions are necessary, but the writing sometimes feels rushed and when indictments veer toward hyperbole, it's unclear how generative they are: “Too many thinkers. Too many charlatans shouting ‘Decolonizing and decoloniality’ from the rooftops just to draw a cushy salary . . . while doing nothing for the people they write about . . . Vampires feeding on the blood of the everyday person” (122).

Dare to Invent the Future dares academia to be more useful. Despite employing and funding some of today's most radical thinkers, global academic institutions cannot help but reify Western tenets of thought, including the idea that “the West invented science. That the West alone knows how to think . . . beyond the West only primitive thinking exists” (47), what Mahvunga calls “knowledge racism” (9). In this, there is overlap with Afropessimist arguments that the future cannot be fixed. Indeed, it must be (re)invented.

Scott W. Schwartz

City College of New York

Bacchini, Luca and Victoria Saramago. 2023. Literature beyond the Human: Post- Anthropocentric Brazil. Routledge Studies in World Literature and the Environment. New York: Routledge. 258 pp. ISBN: 978-1032153995

Literature shapes and is shaped by the many worlds it occupies. But what does this mean for a possibly post-anthropocentric world? Bacchini and Saramago's edited volume surveys a range of Brazilian literature from the eighteenth to twenty-first century to set up broader questions of the “Human,” Anthropos, and (Post-)Anthropocentrism. As the first English-language book to unpack these works through this framing, it positions Brazilian authors as relevant and central to ongoing global discourses, providing perspectives that would otherwise be largely overlooked. The collection consists of three body sections—Multiple Natures, Anthropoethnocen- trism and the Animal Gaze, and Present Crises and the Anthropocene—with an introduction from the editors and a closing contribution from Indigenous Krenak activist and writer Ailton Krenak.

Part I, “Multiple Natures”, problematizes the “ontological, political, and affective dimen- sions” of “nature” in the context of eighteenth- to twenty-first-century Brazil. It speaks to de- bates over anti-Native, gendered, and classed dynamics in these literary representations. This section consists of a total of five contributions, including that of Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Rex P. Nielsen, Javier Uriarte, Raúl Antelo, and Malcolm K. Mcnee. Schwarcz's “Nature as Nation” examines Brazilian Ro- manticsm through the crafts of José de Alencar, Gonçalves de Magalhães and Gonçalves Dias to shine light on how the incremental invisibilization and genocide of Native communities further advances the fabrication of a “nature” as a terra nullius. As such, the Brazilian empire of Pedro II created a vision of an extractable and profitable tropical “nature” that was intended to conquer. Raúl Antelo's entry discusses how Modernist literature in 1960s São Paulo, specifically the poetry of Oswald de Andrade, discussed cannibalism through the conceptual language of antropofagia, meant to be reflective of Brazil's “cul- tural cannibalism.” Antelo introduces the concept of anthropoemia, “the exclusion of the other” (7), in conversation with antropofagia to reconceptualize difference and human subjectivities. In thinking with the many ways the Cartesian dualism of Nature and Culture has been propagated, challenged, and (re)imagined, this section seeks to unpack “multiple natures.” It is particularly successful in not siloing or side-stepping “culture,” bringing forth a more sophisticated outlook on how different peoples and communities see themselves in relation to their worlds.

In part II, “Anthropoethnocentrism and the Animal Gaze”, the book critically theorizes the racialized and ethnicized dimensions of anthropocentrism by engaging with how literature thinks about matters of the “animal.” The section includes contributions from Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Maria Esther Maciel, Ettore Finazzi-Agrò, Sérgio Medeiros, and Patrícia Vieira. For instance, by working through the sadistic interplays between the racial and the animal in Joaquim Machado de Assis’ satirical oeuvre, Isfahani- Hammond asserts how scientific positivism supports hierarchies of power within the Brazilian Republic, specifically at the turn of the twentieth century. This section's turn to the zoopoetic makes important key intervention as to how power moves within, through, and between the taxonomy of human/nonhuman, problematizing these categories to reframe anthropocentrism.

“Present Crises and the Anthropocene”, part III of the collection, examines what out- looks and insights Brazilian literature could provide toward thinking about the contemporary environmental crises of the twenty-first century. Reading the writing of twentieth- century writer Clarice Lispector, Carvalho wittingly frames her literature's “resistance to redemptive possibilities and expectations of closure” as welcoming “a meditation on life among the unthinkable prospects of environ- mental catastrophes” (181). Cisneros explores how garbage as a poetic fixture takes up numerous meanings in Brazilian film and poetry (195). Anderson's chapter offers a “reading of The Falling Sky [by Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Bruce Albert] as an Indigenous posthumanist manifesto” to foster a conversation between “Euro-American posthumanism and Yanomami cosmopolitical thought regarding the social and political agency of nonhumans” (216). Bringing us back to the “now,” this section does an excellent job at bringing attention to what is at stake by looking at these texts’ situated treatment of humans and the environment, no matter how distant for far back they might be from the reader.

Literary studies of the anthropocentric presented in this book are, after all, a portal to meaningfully engage with emerging discourses about future possibilities and possible futures. Ailton Krenak's closing chapter invites the reader to think about the post-human in what Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena (2018) would call a “world of many worlds.” Honing into on the dissonant monolithization that one could consider “Brazilian identity,” Krenak compellingly welcomes us to embrace differences and how they “constitute the true power that will gives us the strength to prevent the state from yoking us all together in order to subdue us” (236). Krenak challenges us to think through how settler-colonial apparatuses, such as the university, constitute an assimilative project that further perpetuates these violences to the Earth and its people, specifically Indigenous peoples (236–237). For Krenak, Earth itself is a living being that people are integrally a part of. Bringing us back to the “post-anthropocene” conversation, Krenak suggests that the more radical project than assimilation into the Western sphere is to move from an ethos of “taking care” of to one of “respecting” this living Earth (238).

Literature Beyond the Human eloquently presents a diverse breadth of contributions to emphasize how expansive Brazil's literary and cultural canon can provide fresh outlooks on ongoing debate around the “post-Anthropocene”. From eighteenth-century chronicles to contemporary Indigenous works, the edited collection constructively brings forth changes and continuities in how Brazilian cultural production has conceptualized and depicted the (non)human. Although there is always more than could and should be done, one of the publication's strengths is how it interrogatively pushes the boundaries of who and what is Brazil, challenging the country's often race-blind presentation. This book offers meaningful viewpoints from and for the fields of Brazilian studies, literary and cultural studies, environmental humanities, comparative race and ethnic studies, critical animal studies, and anthropology.

Andrés Triana Solórzano

Yale University

Khan, Naveeda. 2023. River Life and the Upspring of Nature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 256 pp. ISBN 978-1-4780-1939-8

In southern Bangladesh, islands made of silt, or “chars”, appear and disappear along the Jamuna River. Chars become submerged during monsoon season; otherwise, they are populated by Bengali Muslim “chauras”, or people of the chars. In River Life and the Upspring of Nature, Naveeda Khan explores human–nature relations through contemporary and historical accounts of chaura lives in the district of Sirajganj. Khan examines how chaura lands, changing climate, and the Jamuna generate human subjectivity and identity through kinship relations, land rights, and an entanglement of Hindu-Muslim morality and religiosity (9). Khan ponders how nature is both within and without, expressed through activity (e.g., growing rice, participating in elections, [re]constructing villages and schools), and passivity (e.g., the persistence of Muslim-Hindu historical memory in drowning deaths, moving as the river dictates). Khan considers how nature is complicit in human projects—either for good (how nature creates culture for which mythology is an important means of expressing itself) or evil (as in chauras’ acts of forgetting Hindus with whom they had previously coexisted, or the negative impacts of flooding and erosion) (17).

Chapter 1 explores contested property regimes and kinship relations, or how a sense of place serves as memory keeper for the mediation of land rights in Bangladesh. Drawing from British colonial cadastral surveys from 1888–1940, the Pakistani Settlement Attestation from 1956–1962, and the subsequent Bangladesh Survey, Khan reveals how chauras define and hold ownership of their lands. Property regimes help chauras assemble kinship relations and retain rights to char lands. Property becomes legal fiction, as documentation of land ownership is legally recognized as property even when land is physically absent. In attending to how matter extends itself through the mind, Khan skillfully connects chaura dreams, speech, and actions as manifestations of chars themselves. Property holdings, documentation, and ownership patterns allow chauras to dictate their movements, settlement, and resettlement on moving lands both spatially and temporally (31).

Narratives of chaura experiences of erosion and flooding illustrate chaura connection to both the chars and the Jamuna. Khan demonstrates how chauras think of themselves as entrained by the river in the same manner as the river entrains sediment and vegetation (19). Chapter 2 examines the history and morality of flooding and erosion and the indexing of nature as the unconscious of the chauras. It is through the recollection of floods and erosion that chauras recount their histories and trace their kinship patterns. Narratives of floods and erosion reveal a correlation between memories of floods and recollection of national events, while narratives of erosion appear disjointed and uncertain. Although land erosion is as frequent and destructive as flooding, chauras identify as historical subjects by weaving their life narratives with those of floods. Conversely, erosion resides in chaura consciousness as the location of the everyday and is expressed through life trajectories dictated by the entrainment by the river through the mediation of erosion.

In 2011 char dwellers engaged in political campaigns to keep their territory alive within national maps and collective imagination. Chapter 3 details how chauras invest in trajectories that situate themselves as landowners in future horizons that may entail the resurfacing of lost lands or the acquiring of property deeds. Chauras reinsert themselves into the ecological and political system of the Jamuna to both comprehend and participate in the workings of nature in and around them (126). Elections both “perform villages and effect events in the landscape”; they offer a way for chauras to insert themselves back into a national imaginary in which they had been excised (119). For Khan, chauras participate in and narrativize elections to reproduce the Jamuna system in the mind's eye (126).

Chapter 4 associates the decay of the river with that of memory for chauras and examines the role that nature plays in facilitating forgetting. Khan identifies ways in which Hindus and Muslims were historically bound in Sirajganj, and how they currently view each other through a lens clouded by conflicts over landholdings. Although flooding and erosion of the Jamuna in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century helped to excise Hindus from char lands by erasing them from chaura past and present memory, Hindu-Muslim re- lations were sought out during land-related transactions. The contradictory nature of chaura estrangement from their past entanglement with Hindus and their current utili- zation of laws targeting Hindus in Bangladesh to secure land exemplifies the moral ambiguity of the unraveling of such relations. This purposive forgetting in the chars is well aligned with the national trend toward differentiating from India and emphasizing the Muslim “Bengaliness” of Bangladesh (135).

To bolster this Muslim-Hindu historical memory, Khan examines how the fading mythology from a past of shared existence with Hindus retains deep cultural and social salience that manifests in chaura women's discourse and dreams surrounding the watery death of children. Chapter 5 explains contemporary Hindu-Muslim entanglement through the deaths of chaura children as caused by a Hindu goddess (Ganga Devi) and a mythic prophet within the Sufistic tradition of Islam (Khwaja Khijir). Chaura women who lost their children in drowning deaths often ascribed culpability to external mythological deities that lure children into the river and plague mothers with forgetfulness.

Khan's detailed account of chaura lives and their spatial and temporal entanglements with nature and historical relationship with Hindus shows how nature acts through lives in the chars. Overall, the book makes an important contribution the concept of natureculture and encourages a shift from human exceptionalism to the importance of the more-than- human aspect of human existence. The centrality of nature to chaura life exemplifies how cognition, the unconscious, and memory are intrinsic to chaura social, political, and spiritual worlds. This book is a must-read for anthropologists and graduate students in- terested in environmental and political an- thropology as well as the anthropology of Southeast Asia. River Life and the Upspring of Nature is an appreciable ethnography that offers new ways of thinking about human–nature relations and the extended inclusion of nature in self.

Jessica Vinson

University of South Florida

Hobart, Hi'iliei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani. 2022. Cooling the Tropics: Ice Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 264 pp. ISBN: 978-1478019190

Iced drinks, cold chains, air-conditioned spaces—these are often framed as “matter-of-fact” interventions for sustaining life and thermal comfort in tropical climates. In Cooling the Tropics, Kānaka Maoli scholar Hi'iliei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart challenges these self-evident thermal perceptions by tracing how they come to be normalized within and in service of settler colonial projects in the Pacific. Specifically, she follows the commodification of ice in Hawai'i during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to investigate how the production and consumption of “artificial cold” is structured by white settler desire to reshape the islands into a palatable, tropical haven for American empire. She presents this history with the meticulous eye of a food studies scholar and with the care and intimacy of someone with vital stakes in Hawaiian pasts, presents, and futures.

In chapter 1, Hobart opens with the longstanding relations between Kānaka Maoli and the summit of Maunakea, where ice naturally occurs on the islands. Kānaka Maoli epistemologies of the cold imbue the summit's icy terrain with animacy, agency, and ancestral spirit. These energetic relations run counter to Western thermal stereotypes of the islands that assume the cold as desolate, rational, and decidedly non-Hawaiian; narratives invoked by colonial empires, past and present, to erase Hawaiian presence on Maunakea, justify its designation as terra nullius, and accelerate its conquest for US and multinational space frontier projects.

Chapter 2 follows the early American ice trade in Hawai'i, tracing its movement from New England freshwater lakes to the most elite political and economic circles in Honolulu's rapidly developing harbor. The ice trade's re- strictive circulation and early unprofitability maintained its status as an indulgent, luxury commodity and adhered its consumption to racial and classed ideas of “modernity” as iced refreshments found an exclusive market among Hawai'i's political elite and foreign businessmen. For Hawai'i's rural populations, early American missionary projects (e.g., Cold Water Army) promoted colonial thermal discourses—heat as indexing savagery and immoral vice, cold as symbolizing civility and piety—to reframe desires for and consumption of the cold as pathways toward salvation.

Chapter 3 opens with a new era of artificial ice consumption heralded by the transformation of ice from a luxury good to a mundane commodity. Drawing on Hawaiian-language newspapers, Hobart follows Kānaka Maoli discourse on the sensory and moral pleasures promised by cold consumption. She assesses Hawaiians’ complex embrace of and displeasures around cold refreshments against broader negotiations of identity, power, and self-determination that shaped Hawaiian political expressions and anxieties during the nineteenth century. Such negotiations were exemplified in the electrification of ‘Iolani palace, the residence of Hawai'i's last monarchy and seat of sovereign power. The palace lit up to a soundscape of Hawaiian nationalist ballads and a celebratory spread of ice cream, tea, and coffee. Hobart reads this spectacle as both the monarchy's strategic embrace of modernity “on Hawaiian terms” and a fatal tangling of Western pleasure into expressions of Hawaiian political sovereignty (89).

Chapter 4 connects the legalize pa'i ‘ai movement, an ongoing struggle for traditional food sovereignty in Hawai'i’, to its corresponding legal and social precedents set one hundred years prior during the nascent years of US occupation. Post annexation, US public health officials increased surveillance around poi, a traditional, taro-based food, and adopted regulatory practices deeply contoured by anti-indigenous and orientalist logics. Health anxieties around poi featured discourses that were as much about race as they were about biology and taste: poi was disparaged by white foreigners as inedible, unsavory, and queer; the crude Hawaiian counterpart to ice cream. Poi distributors and urban taro farmers, many of whom were Chinese and Japanese immigrants, were sub- jected to racist tropes of contagion and un- lawfulness by American health officials. These racialized discourses of safety, purity, and taste endure in Hawai'i's current regulatory landscape of food management, operating as and within what Hobart describes as “microbiopolitical forms of settler colonial governance” (93).

Chapter 5 traces post-statehood social imaginaries through the consumption of shaved ice, a celebrated emblem of Hawai'i's “rainbow multiculturalism” that collapses in- digenous dispossession and coercive labor regimes into a sugar-coated, multiethnic utopia (121). Hobart charts how plantation infrastructures on the islands were often expanded and repurposed into hubs for the sale and distribution of cold storage and electricity to surrounding rural communities. The arrival of refrigeration—made ubiquitous via these rural electrification networks—transformed cold refreshments, such as shaved ice, into common goods consumed across multiethnic plantation communities in the early twentieth century. This history was noticeably distorted, however, in post-statehood narratives that rescripted shaved ice as a universal, childhood pastime that transcended social difference. For Hobart, invoking childlike nostalgia to scrub the colonial sensibilities and plantation infrastructures that made possible this “local” food is strategic. It renders colonial politics as “innocent and benign” and suppresses indigenous struggle in favor of depoliticized sentiments of “Hawaiianess” (128).

Hobart ends the book where she begins, back on Maunakea's summit animated by deep land relations and Kānaka Maoli worldbuilding. This time, she's standing in an en- campment among close friends and elders, protesting the summit's most recent threat of colonial occupation: the Thirty Meter Telescope. In what often feels rare for academic texts, Hobart is insistent, until the very last page, that her history-telling remains accountable and responsive to ongoing sovereignty work. She asks, honestly and vulnerably, about the “what now?”—what do we do with infrastructures, like refrigeration, that are complicit in indigenous dispossession but also vital for sustaining anticolonial movements, like the protests on Maunakea's summit? How do we fit these infrastructures into a world “that re- fuses the legacies of their making” (145)?

With its creative history-telling of an object as mundane and ephemeral as ice, this book offers valuable insights for scholars studying technologies of settler colonialism, race and indigeneity, food sovereignty, the politics of temperature, the sensory/sensation, and militarism and tropical leisure. And as racialized thermal narratives continue to mark difference, rationalize violence and resource extraction, and affix bodies and landscapes to bleak colonial futures, this text remains timely and relevant for many more.

Hina Walajahi

Massachusetts Institute of Technology