Benson, Peter. 2023. Stuck Moving Or, How I Learned to Love (and Lament) Anthropology. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 380 pp. Pb.: US$29.95, ISBN: 9780520388741.

With Stuck Moving, Peter Benson has written an unconventional book. It's self-critical, honest and deeply personal. It is an intimate insight into an American professor's life as he struggles with drug abuse, bipolar disorder, pregnancy loss, a stalled career and the ethics of extractivism.

Across sixteen chapters, Benson, aware of his white, male, American, academic privileges, examines his experience of how ‘[t]he anthropologist must perform cultural ideals of autonomy, cohesion, privacy, and sanity to have a chance at succeeding in the discipline, which covers over the intimate, personal, and patchwork nature of research – and life in general’ (p. 281). This performance, Benson finds, produces a dynamics of separation, objectification, othering and selving, which underpin an enshrined, colonial model of extractive knowledge production (p. 281).

At the centre of the text stands the author's perception of being stuck, personally in a life marked by mental disorder and addiction, professionally in a colonial discipline, and socially in an unjust society, while moving along the messy, complex, complicated and meandering paths of everyday life. Stuck moving.

Stylistically, the book is a ‘self-conscious experiment in form that draws together . . . anthropological thought and the pop culture’ of the author's youth (p. xiv). An amalgamation of genres, the text frequently switches from auto-ethnography to life-writing, turns into an open letter, morphs into screen play sequences, fans out into dialogue collages, braids into poetry or branches out into sports reviews and socio-critical commentaries, all linked through references to songs, movies and scholarly literature.

Untwining the strands that twist Benson's personal story, a white, male, American, academic life unravels into vulnerable filaments. A conservative upbringing by hard-working parents and a European ancestry with a not unproblematic ‘cultural and psychological heritage’ (p. 201) are followed by an adolescence in a beloved Connecticut fraught with sexual taboos and insecurities before a graduate romance turns marriage and is shaken by drug use and mental health, while being held together by love, determination and joint trips to Guatemala. Then the couple's family life unfolds, childbirth complications, parent–child closeness, pregnancy loss and the colonialism inherent in school system choices. Benson's bipolar disorder leads to complications in personal settings and glitches in rudeness in his professional life, and in addition he grapples with a discipline which he experiences to bestow, at once, critical clarity and conceit. The latter Benson illustrates via his hypercritical stance on the US American tobacco industry in his first, celebrated monograph Tobacco Capitalism, an attitude which severed the meaningful relationship to his main informant. Finally, Benson discusses the USA's devastating foreign policy concerning Guatemala and its obsession with war, heroism and catharsis vis-à-vis the documented ties between warfare and geostrategic economic gain. These political considerations grow out of Benson's personal biography: through regular trips to Guatemala he and his partner have formed deeply meaningful relationships with locals who have become kin, while narratives of benign warfare, heroism and economic growth were integral to his US American upbringing.

Across this reckoning, which poetically, ironically, humorously and sincerely dissects positionality in a wrestling for ethical coherence, the key concept is life's messy complexities. Chapter 2 is an open letter to Benson's main informant for Tobacco Capitalism, a North Carolinian tobacco grower who ‘felt fatherly’ to Benson. Benson, equally, sensed he ‘felt like something of a son’ to the grower (p. 30). The author's harsh critique of the tobacco industry's practices and politics – critique that gained him academic awards and tenure – alienated the informant to the extent that he cancelled all communication. Benson deeply regrets this estrangement and, in the open letter, reflects that in his monograph, he may have ‘projected frustrations and feelings about [his own father] onto men that remind[ed] me of him’ (p. 35). The ‘anxieties, ambivalences, attachments, and aggressions of father-and-son relationships’ (p. 35) reverberate through the author's biography and his personal struggles with ableism and body shame; they also permeate his employment situation and his professional critique of academic knowledge production and US American politics. In this sense, Benson's text is a critique of patriarchy, its colonialist-extractivist practices and its politically oppressive, culturally othering, socially unjust and personally disabling structures of objectification. The stuckness.

The text is also a portrayal of a life embracing its own messy complexities. A story of overcoming addiction, living with disorder, making kin across cultural differences and sustaining ties despite personal shortcomings. A story of being loved for who one is, and loving in return. A story of messing up, and trying again. The moving.

This contradiction, of being stuck moving, reveals the complexities of an academic's life usually concealed in scholarly writing. As a key concept, it pushes considerations of positionality towards self-critical reflection: personally, academically and socio-politically. Far from being navel-gazing, its relevance lies in advancing the discipline, and academic writing, away from colonial dynamics towards embracing vulnerabilities and complexities as significant in forging and informing scholarship.

This anti-patriarchic stance permeates not only what Benson writes, but also how he writes, in cyclical, recurrent motions brimming with texture, poetry and flair. It takes courage to write a book like this, and skill to write it in this way. Benson has proven both, and his book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the human behind the monograph, the person behind the tenure.

ELVIRA WEPFER

The Schumacher Institute (United Kingdom)

McDowell, Andrew. 2024. Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. 272 pp. Pb.: US$28.00, ISBN: 9781503638778.

Andrew McDowell's Breathless is a moving portrayal of life amid the ill effects of tuberculosis and inequality in an out-of-the-way place. More specifically, the book sets out to refigure TB as an ‘atmospheric illness’ that ‘infuses life in ways that both are constrained by and exceed social and biological explanations’ (p. 4). It argues that in failing to consider TB-induced breath's ‘atmospheric entanglements’, and in remaining ‘breathless’, both public health and anthropology have thus far neglected to account for TB's diffuse effects on bodies, selves and atmospheres. Thus, the book makes a powerful, ethnographically grounded case for why both disciplines must ‘breathe’.

Much of the book's action takes place in and around Ambawati (a pseudonym), home to about 1,500 Dalit (caste-oppressed groups) and Adivasi (indigenous people) residents in the Northwest Indian state of Rajasthan. Sixteen years in the making, McDowell undertook several rounds of fieldwork in Ambawati – the longest being over 16 consecutive months in 2011–2012 – to craft this vivid account of life with a treatable yet too-frequently lethal disease. Barring the introduction and conclusion, the book contains seven chapters. Chapters 2–7 focus on one atmospheric substance each, in all its material, immaterial and metaphorical forms: Breath; Dust; Air; Mud; Clouds; and Forests. Chapter 8 develops an ‘atmosphere of afterlife’, drawing attention to TB's haunting persistence in death, as in a mother's limp or through wheezing spirit mediums.

Each chapter unfolds a unique perspective on the book's signature concept of ‘atmospheric entanglements’: ‘complex ecologies . . . [that] enmesh human and nonhuman actors, affects, meanings, and places in sometimes fleeting and sometimes persistent webs of connection’ (p. 4). In so doing, the book contributes to anthropology's so-called ‘atmospheric turn’, itself part of broader shifts in attention to the ecological, more-than-human and climatic dimensions of social life. Despite these universalist resonances, its insights and observations are resolutely derived from Ambawatian perspectives on breath, atmospheres and bodies.

Through rich ethnographic vignettes, McDowell shows how people provide much-needed ‘atmospheric care’ (a concept he borrows from Michael Vine and develops through the book) to those affected by TB, when health systems fail to do so. Atmospheric care involves practices through which people act on the breathed environment to provide support or relief. These range from enlisting the help of neighbours, tantric healers and deities to bring a TB-infected body back into ‘rolation’ (rotation) (chapter 2), to a son fanning his sick father at the expense of his schooling (chapter 4), to caring for the life-breath of tubercular ghosts (chapter 8). Often misunderstood as universal or presocial context in which life happens, such practices reveal atmospheres to instead be social, cultural and political in their composition and effects.

Such atmospheric politics are foregrounded in chapter 4. McDowell shows how air and atmospheres carry affects, meanings and biomedically or ritually dangerous substances whose effects must be managed. He illustrates this through an account of how practices of managing caste pollution and bacterial contagion overlap, revealing not just TB and breath but also caste as atmospherically entangled. Throughout the book, we are also provided several interesting descriptions of local Ambawatian perspectives on the body and its atmospheric connections. For instance, in chapter 6 we learn about how the action of specific clouds on bodies can disclose the moral status of individuals, reorganise care obligations and forge unpredictable biosocial collectives.

In Ambawati, vernacular bodily practices coexist alongside clinic and hospital- based care. The chapters on ‘Dust’ (chapter 3) and ‘Mud’ (chapter 5) take aim at the failures and absurdities of the pastoral state's TB control mechanisms. Dust that settles in clinics becomes a metaphor for the residues of colonial-era counterinsurgency tactics that keep unruly biopolitical subjects in check. Mud that sticks to bodies and selves prompts telling lies and performing ‘bureaucratic subjectivity’ (p. 121) to access hospital-based care, thus laying bare development's unfulfilled promises. Other examples of development's shortcomings include instances of self-discharge wherein people stop taking TB medication due to exhaustion or withdraw from hospital care due to ghostly visions of bad deaths.

The book offers a blistering yet measured critique of public health's pharmaceuticalised TB care and biomedicine's blinkered scientific rationalism. It argues that in the era of multiple-drug-resistant (MDR) TB, which renders aspirations of cure and eradication chimerical, public health systems cannot merely respond with a combination of pharmaceuticals, blame and surveillance. Instead, the book compellingly shows, these systems must find ways of providing atmospheric care (better ventilation, sanitation, roads, infection-control measures, electrification etc.), so that this burden does not fall entirely on vulnerable communities.

Breathless is eminently readable, absorbing and empathetic. Its interrogation of why so many die from a treatable disease justifies its sometimes-angered tone. The book compels the reader to widen the lens through which to view TB and inequality, posing difficult questions on living together and sharing breath within atmospheres that unevenly distribute suffering. For that, it will resonate with readers far beyond those interested in medical anthropology, public health and South Asia.

TANUJ LUTHRA

University of Oxford (United Kingdom)

McElroy, Erin. 2024. Silicon Valley Imperialism. Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 296 pp. Pb.: US$27.95. ISBN: 9781478030218.

Since the early 2000s, so-called smart cities aspiring to become the next Silicon Valley have been established across the world, from Silicon Savannah in Nairobi, Kenya, to Chilecon Valley in Santiago, Chile. In countries that were formerly colonised and/or belonged to the communist bloc, what Erin McElroy describes as Siliconization came with the submission of local histories to new racialised and gentrified logics of empire. In her book, McElroy skilfully combines participant observation among housing justice collectives and justice-based artists in Bucharest, the Transilvania Smart City in Cluj and the San Francisco Bay Area with archival research, to analyse the racial and spatial violence that anti-communist Silicon Valley technopolitics and technofantasies produce.

McElroy's argument interweaves and develops four concepts: racial technocapitalism, Silicon Valley imperialism, technofascism and postsocialism. Building on Cedric Robinson's (1983) and Lisa Lowe's (2015) work, McElroy approaches capitalism as co-constituted by racism, colonial logics and technologies since its development, beginning with the racialised dispossession and exploitation of Roma, Jews, Tartars, Irish and others in the borderlands of early modern Europe. She theorises Silicon Valley imperialism as a new version of racial technocapitalism: a global condition of material and infrastructural dominance, which in its desire for unending growth penetrates people's lives across the globe and disseminates racialised and exploitative entrepreneurial desires. McElroy argues that under the guise of liberal ideals, racial technocapitalism can create fascist possibilities. She conceptualises postsocialism as not just referring to the post-1989 condition, but also as an analytic that allows scholars to theorise the various anticapitalist practices, imaginaries and actions beyond the socialist state that reverberate in the past and present.

This critical theorisation forms a very welcome contribution to academic and societal debates. McElroy's conceptual framework allows her to analyse the contemporary presence of socialist and racial capitalist histories rendered invisible by Silicon Valley imperialism, thus untangling some of its destructive power. As anthropologists like Sherry Ortner (2010) and Rosita Armytage (2018) have shown, elites typically try to maintain their claims to power through carefully controlled narratives. Criticising Silicon Valley's self-proclaimed liberalism, McElroy shows how the racially marginalised Roma in Cluj, who got access to nationalised houses during state socialism, post-1989 were evicted to make place for new tech businesses (chapter 1). In the Bay Area, the development of Silicon Valley was intertwined with land capture from Native Americans (chapter 2). IBM, a tech business that benefited from post-1989 liberalisation in Romania, contributed to Hitler's genocide (chapter 4). Pushing back against Silicon Valley's framing of those formerly living under state socialism as technologically backward, McElroy shows that under socialism a rich cyberculture emerged in Romania (chapter 5).

While McElroy's argument that technologically driven logics of empire result in the dispossession and exploitation of the racially marginalised is convincing, her conceptualisation of Silicon Valley imperialism could be made even stronger by analysing what binds and drives those ‘up’. McElroy claims that Silicon Valley imperialism is connected to US imperialism but is not similar, is also imposed by businesses with predominantly Western European and Japanese origins, and describes that post-1989 Romanian governments welcomed new foreign tech businesses to the country. To increase our understanding of Silicon Valley's imperial power, it might help to theorise how these various business and government elites are connected in their empire making and what makes inflicting the destruction of Silicon Valley's racial technocapitalism desirable to them (Bhattacharyya 2018).

McElroy's most important and very inspiring contribution with her book is how she uses her conceptualisation of postsocialism to explore the historical (and fractured) relationship between socialist and decolonial movements. She speculates that the power of Silicon Valley imperialism can only be fully understood when these two movements are analysed together and solidarity between them is fostered. In doing so, she encourages the development of a postsocialist tech studies field, which researches the connections between technological development in countries with anti-imperial and socialist histories, such as many Eastern European and African countries. As the study of technological development in these countries is still too often academically confined to different Area Studies circles, an academic debate which understands the local appropriation of and resistance against Silicon Valley as intertwined with transnational socialist and decolonial histories would be empirically and theoretically enriching.

McElroy's theoretical framework makes her book relevant to students and academics beyond just those interested in the history of Eastern Europe. As a theoretically rich book, it would work well in a third-year undergraduate or postgraduate course. McElroy's book is a must-read for students and researchers interested in the debate on the emergence and impact of Silicon Valley, the politics of housing and infrastructure, socialism and racial capitalism, and historical anthropology. It is also an important book for those activists, policy makers and other societal actors concerned with the effects of Siliconization.

TESSA PIJNAKER

Utrecht University (the Netherlands)

Wolf-Meyer, Matthew J. 2024. American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 296 pp. Pb.: US$29.00, ISBN: 9781517916244.

This daring book examines the consolidation of racial understandings of health in the United States, beginning in the nineteenth century, alongside the government of bodies at multiple scales – from the individual to the body politic, the microbial to the planetary. The embodied reaction of disgust and its entwinement with modern American medicine is at the heart of this theoretically ambitious project. Of particular interest is the repugnance for substances imbued with microbes, including fermented ‘natural’ foods like yogurt, once excluded from normative (white) American dietary practices, but also human waste and the excremental. Animating this work is a key question about the affective potentialities of disgust and its role in the fashioning of personhood and subjectivities. What happens when someone drinks lacto-fermented pickle juice or when a person, suffering from inflammatory bowel disease, ingests human faeces? Tracing how scientific and medical discourses and practices have specifically framed certain microbial elements as either repulsive or helpful, the book brings under sharper distinction the different forms of social relations – such as regulation or stewardship – that contribute to the understanding of bodies as racialised, bounded wholes that can be kept separate from their environments. For one, disgust is a cultivated sensibility that reaffirms unequal power relations. For another, experiencing something as disgusting in one situation and beneficial in another unsettles disgust. This, the author suggests, offers a productive lens through which to reconceptualise human and non-human relations and rethink our ecological futures.

The book is organised in two parts – Part I: Genealogies of American Disgust and Part II: Disgust and Medicine – to underscore how biomedicine governed the microbial and, more specifically, the excremental: though it attempted to eradicate it, it continually resurfaced. Cutting across its seven chapters is a concern with navigating the abject in ways that become productive for rethinking the microbial as medicine and for theorising the human body. With each chapter engaging representative texts from anthropology, nutrition, child rearing and medicine that address the microbial, Part I sketches a history of American disgust throughout the twentieth century. Pulling this history into the present, Part II is more ethnographic. Chapters 5 and 6 are particularly compelling from a methodological perspective, especially since the book was completed during the coronavirus pandemic. Centring transcripts and proceedings from an institutional workshop on ‘Fecal Microbial Transplant’ (FMT) as well as discussions from FMT online communities, these two chapters illustrate the potential of an ethnographic inquiry that does not entail field visits. Despite its limitations, this approach might prove helpful for researchers who, for diverse reasons, are unable to access their fieldwork sites.

In keeping with anthropological tradition, the book is also reflexive, structured around the author's experimentation with food and a familial struggle to restore gut health and well-being. Interspersed between chapters, short vignettes or ‘Thresholds’ convey the author's proximity to the people, places and historical experiences that he writes about. Within the chapters, the author's personal reflections – his mother's espousal of the natural-food movement of the 1960s (Chapter 2) or his family's introduction to Elimination Communication, the practice of raising a child diaper-free (Chapter 4) – bring a distinctive ethnographic quality to the book. Another remarkable feature is the way that the writing itself unsettles readers’ disgust. Even though many of the book's anecdotes are suffused with shit, they succeed in piquing curiosity about habit and taste, rather than provoking mere repulsion.

Critically reflecting on emergent discourses of ‘planetary health’, which are presented as a continuation of the developmental ethos of the twentieth century in other forms, the book's final chapter serves as a kind of epilogue or coda. It is there that the promise of microbial medicine becomes clearly articulated. Counterpoising the governability of human bodies with the rather fugitive character of microbes, this chapter demonstrates how microbial medicine could herald the possibility for the creation of ecological subjects. As microbes from yogurt cultures or faecal matters are neither inherently good nor bad, they challenge the very logics of regulating, standardising and consolidating racialised understandings of bodies and their barriers. They also invite new forms of knowledge that can redefine the human body in a way that can attend to multispecies relations.

This book's thorough analysis of disgust evokes Marcel Mauss's attempt at theorising techniques of the body, as a set of ‘physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of series of actions’ that require our careful ethnographic attention (Mauss 1973). Because of the book's impressive scope, some threads remain uncharted. I found myself wanting to learn more about the political economy undergirding the emergence of the Standard American Diet and its correlate affect, disgust. I was also left wondering about the oft-contested relations between ecological thinking and ongoing social processes of racialisation and politics. Overall, this book is a key work for understanding the entwinement of embodied experience with dominant social and political orders. It will be of great interest to graduate students, physicians, medical and psychological anthropologists, historians of science, nutrition and medicine, affect theorists and scholars of American studies, as well as anyone curious about bowel movements or eating.

CYNTHIA KREICHATI

McGill University (Canada)

Strümpell, Christian. 2023. Steel Town Adivasis: Industry and Inequality in East- ern India. New Delhi: Social Science Press. 390 pp. Hb.: IN₹1375, ISBN: 9789383166572.

This book is an ethnographic exploration of class formation in industrial India. With a particular focus on the Adivasi (tribal) communities like Santals and Mundaris who were displaced, employed and subsequently marginalised by the establishment of one of India's largest industrial units, the book captures how the Nehruvian aspirations of building a secular and modern India unfolded in the light of regional state-formation processes in a steel town in Odisha. Through fieldwork spanning 2004 to 2019, Strümpell presents a profound understanding of how class formations take place in relation to ethnicity and caste. Inspired by Jonathan Parry's study (2020) of Bhilai in Chhattisgarh, the book traces the evolution of Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) and its surrounding town through the experiences of Santals, Mundaris and other Adivasi groups. Weaving historical analysis with anthropological insights, it captures the complex dynamics of the interaction between class ethnicity, and regional politics. Critically engaging with Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and the Copper Belt Studies, the author appreciates recent ethnographies for focusing on class relations, which the former left unexplored.

The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 opens with the author's account of his initial impressions on arriving in Rourkela in 2004. The vivid descriptions offer readers a glimpse into how aspirations were evolving in small towns and cities with the onset of neoliberal market reforms in early twenty-first-century India. Along with capturing the changing urban landscape, it introduces the theoretical frameworks and analytical concepts that underpin the book.

Chapter 2 emphasises how the establishment of the RSP was not only limited to the building of the modern Indian state and nation but also extended to the process of regional state formations and sub-nation state building projects. Illustrating how social conflicts informed these projects, it points to the internal divides between Odisha's upland areas (garhjats) and its coastal regions (mugalbandi) which played a crucial role in this process. Through focusing on the neglected aspect of Odia nationalism by previous scholars like Guha, Strümpell highlights how Odia nationalism shaped the recruitment of labour and labour politics within the RSP.

Concentrating on labour dynamics, chapter 3 explores how ethnicity and caste influenced the recruitment process at RSP across different decades. It describes how the RSP workforce, which was multi-ethnic, multi-caste and multi-religious in its formative years and reflected the idealistic vision of India's industrial future, became increasingly dominated by Odia workers in later years, thanks to both state-sponsored nationalism and union politics. This, Strümpell argues, led to a form of labour segmentation that marginalised Adivasis and other non-Odia workers. It further shows how shifts in labour relations due to neoliberal restructuring created new alliances between informal and formal workers, while simultaneously deepening ethnic tensions within the workforce.

One of the book's strongest contributions is its exploration of how Adivasis were stereotyped and marginalised within the RSP's workforce. Chapter 4 traces the colonial roots of these stereotypes, where Adivasis were viewed as ‘uneducated’, ‘jungali’ (wild) and prone to drunkenness. It effectively shows how these racialised stereotypes shaped Adivasis’ roles within the labour hierarchy, relegating them to the most dangerous jobs in the steel plant's coke ovens and blast furnaces. Through personal narratives, Strümpell also shows how Adivasis grappled with the meaning of their ‘Adivasiness’ and their desire for upward mobility. This struggle, he argues, reflects broader processes of class formation in urban India, where ethnic and class identities are closely intertwined.

Chapter 5 shifts focus from labour politics to urban space, examining how Rourkela's steel town was developed as a ‘model company town’. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's (1991) concept of the ‘production of space’, it analyses how Rourkela's urban planning was shaped by both Nehruvian socialism and Odia nationalism. Contrary to the town's master plan, developed by the German steel manufacturer Krupp, which aimed to create an orderly, modern space for workers, the town became segregated along ethnic lines, with Adivasis and other marginalised groups relegated to the peripheries in resettlement colonies and bastis (informal settlements). This spatial segregation, Strümpell demonstrates, reinforced the social and economic marginalisation of Adivasis and the township that was imagined as a melting pot of India's diverse ethnicities turned into a ‘salad bowl’, where distinct groups retained their identities and inequalities persisted.

In the final chapter, Strümpell reflects on how Adivasis [in Rourkela] redefine their identities in response to their changing social and economic circumstances. While some Adivasis aspire to join the middle class, their pursuit of middle-class status often comes at the expense of solidarity with the labouring Adivasi class. This process, Strümpell emphasises, has significant political implications, as it undermines collective struggles against both class and ethnic oppression.

While the book offers a rich historical and ethnographic account of labour, class and ethnic politics, it misses an opportunity to address the legal complexities surrounding Adivasi rights in urban areas, particularly the intersections of urban planning laws and tribal laws like the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act and the Forest Rights Act. Nevertheless, it is of great value for scholars interested in the intersections of urbanisation, labour processes, caste and understanding their intersection in contemporary India. In brief, it stands as a critical contribution to the study of industrialisation and inequality in India, offering new insights into the experiences of marginalised communities in the urban context.

KRISHNA KANT YADAV

University of Delhi (India)

Tooley, Christa Ballard. 2023. Tenement Nation: Working-class Cosmopolitanism in Edinburgh. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 261 pp. Hb.: US$75.00, ISBN: 9780253065995.

Christa Ballard Tooley's Tenement Nation is a fascinating ethnography of community campaigns and urban politics in Canongate, a working-class neighbourhood in Edinburgh's Old Town. The book presents rigorous analyses of the tensions and negotiation between top-down depoliticising development and bottom-up repoliticising resistance. A careful examination of the latter articulates the aesthetic denigration and political imaginaries of class, nation and their entanglements with the welfare state and cosmopolitan ideals.

The book's analytical framework substantially builds on Jacques Rancière's political aesthetics. As Tooley suggests, Rancière's attentiveness to ‘the inherently aesthetic dimensions of politics’ inspires a situated study of the particular material forms of Canongate's built environment (p. 4). Notably, Tooley shifts from the ‘worldly effects’ to the ‘affective components’ of Rancière's aesthetic activism (p. 200) and relates her emphasis with Paul Connerton's discussion of memory and the ‘defamiliarization’ of place (p. 129). Tooley's focus on the everyday practices, experiences and affective encounters between people and places significantly informs her discussion of the Canongate residents’ Save Our Old Town campaign (chapter 3) and their active responses to the Scottish National Party's political rhetoric of a multicultural and cosmopolitan Scotland (chapter 5). Besides Rancière, David Harvey's classics on neoliberalism inform the review of Caltongate and New Waverley, the two redevelopment projects in Canongate (chapter 2). And an in-depth engagement with Hannah Arendt significantly enhances the explanation of the Canongate residents’ attachment to home, or their right to ‘be at home’ (chapter 4).

As the book title informs, Tooley approaches the campaigns in Canongate through an interpenetration of neighbourhood and nation. The research can thus be read as a brave challenge to the rigid conventions that define the boundaries between local, national and global, which may echo the theme of the book series it belongs to (Framing the Global). Similarly, people's narratives and engagements with the nationalist politics in Scotland present a fluid dynamic between their private and communal worlds (p. 227). The comparisons between Canongate and Dumbiedykes (interlude 3), and between Edinburgh and Glasgow (interlude 4), further embed the focused study of a specific working-class community in a larger social and historical context. What may also be worth problematising, however, are the boundaries on the other end, precisely the multiple definitions of ‘home’ and ‘community’ as they unfold in different contexts.

Since the chapters are organised in thematic rather than chronological order, one can start the book from any point, keeping in mind the underlying timeline (p. 22). I found the inclusion of interludes an effective way to enrich the content and expand the discussion of the book. While interludes 1 and 2 were like ethnographic vignettes which provide stories and narratives that resonate with the factual or conceptual discussions in the chapters they follow, the compact studies of Dumbiedykes and Glasgow in interludes 3 and 4 enable comparison and contrast at broader scales.

Methodologically, Tooley combines immersive and long-term fieldwork with extensive reviews of historical materials. The review of Patrick Geddes's Conservative Surgery in chapter 1 resonates with the ethnographic analyses in the interlude and the chapters that follow, presenting the prolonged impact and implication for the present. It would be better, however, if the archival photos, as well as the photos that the author took in fieldwork, were printed in larger sizes and in colour to demonstrate the details that may inspire further interpretations. Besides the longue durée of her fieldwork, which took place in several phases between around 2006 and 2018, Tooley adopted multiple roles to participate in everyday life in Canongate. To understand the impact of Caltongate Development, she learnt to work as a sales person in a local women's clothing shop. This approach enabled her to capture a beautiful story of how the Canongate residents and retailers ‘delicately danced around’ their different attitudes towards the redevelopment plan of their neighbourhood through ‘banal, everyday interactions’, and how their life trajectories drifted apart in the relocations that turned neighbours into strangers (interlude 2).

Overall, I found Tooley's Tenement Nation a worthwhile read for my anthropological interest in community life of English-speaking worlds. People who are interested in the history of Edinburgh Old Town or Scottish politics may also discover many informative details and useful references. Although the book is classified as an ethnography of urban places and politics in Edinburgh, Tooley's cross-scale and boundary-contesting analyses should inspire colleagues who work on diverse topics in anthropology and sociology.

YUXIN PENG

University of Oxford (United Kingdom)

Kusserow, Adrie. 2024. The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poetry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 176 pp. Pb.: US$19.95. ISBN: 9781478025573.

Anthropologist and poet Adrie Kusserow's new memoir The Trauma Mantras explores questions of genre, the self and the role of suffering in human life and ethnographic representations. Across sixty-seven chapters that are each generally one-to-two pages in length, The Trauma Mantras follows Kusserow's own development as a person set against her professional experience as a fieldworker, from travelling and studying Buddhism in India and Tibet to her childhood to working with refugees across the globe and at ‘home’, which for the author is a small upper-middle class, mostly white community in rural Vermont. The book skilfully juxtaposes the complex and paradoxical relationship between the anthropologist's professional and private selves and illuminates the connection between individual and collective suffering.

The title The Trauma Mantras is a response to and critique of the injunction to repeat the original experience through its narration that many trauma survivors face. Drawn back through memory to her own traumatic experiences, such as the tragic death of her father and unwanted sexual contact and attention while abroad, the narrator relives them and their accompanying feelings, such as shame and guilt. Through poetic imagery and evocative language, the author deftly shows how refugees from various locations, such as from Uganda and South Sudan, are compelled by NGOs and other colonial institutions to reduce their understandings and expressions of self to that of the isolated, individualised self. Against this type of self, which the book often glosses as ‘Western’, the author advocates for a more distributed, socially and environmentally shared self. The generative paradox of a memoir that seeks to undo individualist notions of the self lies, as it does with mantras, in the potential of the repetition to move through the limitations of identity, to show how the stories (good or bad) that we tell about ourselves are not fully our own, but rather, that these stories, when shared, both lose and gain power; as Fred Moten might say, they become more plus less than us.

While this book does an excellent job of opening a conversation about the nature of the self and of trauma, and of performing the same kind of liberatory passage through the self that other contemporary works of autotheory explore, The Trauma Mantras depends heavily on irony as a mode of cultural critique, especially around the contemporary culture of therapy. The Trauma Mantras tends to understand the state of so-called Western therapeutic practices mostly through pop cultural understandings of psychotherapy. For example, the author gives several examples of her undergraduate students ostensibly un-self-reflexively bandying about ‘therapy speak’, watering down important concepts such as ‘feeling triggered’ or the word ‘trauma’ itself. Being a work that compels the reader through feeling and imagery, it might be unfair to expect this book to engage with psychoanalytic perspectives, even if the text itself seems to raise the issue of this lack.

Less than the ongoing thread of cultural critique, the moments in the book that I found most compelling – intellectually, emotionally – were those that stuck closely to the narrator's development as a person. For example, in moments of self-discovery and growth, but also moments of pain and grief, such as the author's experience of chemotherapy, her intimate relationship to the land where she grew up and where she currently lives, or her relationship with her mother. In a chapter key to understanding the narrator's relationship to the subject matter, ‘The Day I Really Became an Anthropologist’, the author describes the tragic death of her father. Kusserow was only nine years old when her father, while driving, was struck and killed by an 18-wheeler. This chapter depicts in gruesome detail her father's bleeding body broken over the steering wheel, comparing his warped jaw to one of those melting clocks in a Salvador Dalí painting. From the moment she found out about her father's death, Kusserow herself became caught in ‘Trauma Inc.’, being prescribed therapists, Valium and other psychotropic drugs. As she struggled to process the grief of this event, Kusserow began to see herself as removed from the rest of social life. Through this example and many others, The Trauma Mantras likewise causes the reader to reflect on the role of their own desires and experiences in shaping their research. If successful in its aim – and I think it is likely to be – this book will inspire the reader to critically reflect on the state of the world and how they are woven into it.

WESLEY ALLEN BRUNSON

University of Toronto (Canada)