Showing papers in "Contemporary Sociology in 2010"

Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

Abstract: Anarchy as Order is the third in a series of related books by Mohammed Bamyeh. Framed most broadly, Anarchy as Order explores that myriad of issues and contestations associated with moving from a society based on ‘‘an imposed order’’ to a society premised on ‘‘an unimposed order.’’ Substantively, this is an elaboration of the theoretical scaffolding Bamyeh began building in these earlier works. This is an essential consideration for the reader at times, because rather than a sustained, conventional engagement with the contemporary anarchist literature, Bamyeh elects in this book to expand further upon notions that were either introduced or at least hinted at in his previous works. (For instance, there are only three or four references to anarchist works published since 1993, while eight of the author’s works are cited.) This can be a fruitful approach that deepens one’s analysis and understanding of the author’s interpretation of anarchy as an unimposed order, but it also places certain obligations on the reader to consider a range of concepts in the broader context of debates that Bamyeh has explored more fully elsewhere. The principle merits of this work concern the author’s serious and considered effort to engage the profoundly difficult task of imagining a society based on unimposed order, while we remain necessarily locked within the analytical and conceptual limitations that reflect our everyday experiences with a society based on imposed order. In this regard, Bamyeh’s challenge is two-fold. First he must develop a language to describe such a society and second he must provide a plausible explanation of possible transitions to such a society. He takes on both of these to varying degrees of success. Where he falters, however, this is primarily a consequence of the inherent conceptual difficulty of presenting and analyzing any vision of a society that remains yet-in-formation. To describe a society based on unimposed order, Bamyeh deploys two basic strategies. First, by way of illustration, he cites cases of anarchy that arise historically (and spontaneously) within the fabric of a society based on imposed order. In the selection and description of cases there is a strong existentialist influence that shapes Bamyeh’s account. Somewhat problematically, however, this existentialist framework is never explicitly detailed and, thus, must be understood as having been earlier introduced in Of Death and Dominion. In fact, the existentialist premises of Bamyeh’s work are essential to understanding his notion of self-development that drives an individual’s pursuit and realization of freedom through the occasional and ongoing creation of anarchist spaces and the continual reorganization of social institutions that follows from this. For Bamyeh, this notion of self-development appears to be an almost exclusively organic process that follows from what it means to be an individual in mass society—regardless of the specific details of that mass society. The second strategy of Bamyeh is to describe a society based on unimposed order by providing a type of counter description of such a society via a series of contrasts with societies based on imposed order. Recognizing the inherent difficulties of presenting a transparent vision of a society whose premises for being remain in a yet-to-be realized set of social conditions and conceptual categories, Bamyeh leads the reader through a detailed account of various conceptual categories of social organization derived from a society based on imposed order and provides an alternative understanding of these same categories as they might be experienced in a society based on unimposed order. These conceptual categories include civil society, the common good, self-will, commitment, and freedom. As a general strategy this strikes me as a plausible and

Unanticipated Gains: The Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life:

Abstract: This book has a catchy title and nice cover art, adding to the reader’s anticipation that it will be an absorbing—and entertaining— read. The price is reasonable, making it potentially attractive as a text. And the book is, in fact, generally quite well written. America’s romance with technology is complicated, contradictory, and confusing, and it certainly deserves more scholarly attention. However, much has already been written on this subject, not enough of which finds its way into the pages of this book. The introduction suggests that its author, fiction writer and English professor Glen Scott Allen, imagines an audience largely unfamiliar with social and cultural studies of science and technology, and tends to leave the impression that he is unfamiliar with much of this work himself. Allen concentrates on what he sees as Americans’ suspicion of the purely scientific, as opposed to the technological, a suspicion that he correctly surmises may have roots in social class distinctions. He reports that in researching this book, he ‘‘began to wonder to what extent . . . American culture [has] shaped American scientific practice’’ (p. 5), as though this were an entirely original question. In Chapter One, he marvels that in 1848 the American Association for the Advancement of Science adopted promotion of the ‘‘purer’’ sciences as its goal (p. 17), and in general implies surprise at his discovery of the social, political, and class-based character of science (although it is not exactly clear how the AAAS vision is an argument that Americans distrust science, instead of an argument that at least some of us approve of it). He discusses the ‘‘selling’’ of American science in Chapter Three without any apparent reference either to the work of sociologist Dorothy Nelkin or to that of media historian Marcel Lafollette, two scholars especially well-known for their careful documentation of how media representations of science and technology have historically served this purpose. Then, in Chapter Four, Allen presents American Pragmatism without reference to John Dewey, who makes only a cameo appearance a few pages later. Surely Dewey’s contribution to Pragmatism would have been an excellent pillar on which to build any argument about American perspectives on practical knowledge. Finally, as a postscript about two pages from the end of the entire work, Allen confesses that two issues ‘‘not specifically addressed in this book are race and gender’’ (p. 260). Struggling to express my reaction to this latter statement in particularly appropriate scholarly language, the phrase that seems to sum it up best is : ‘‘Well, duh!’’ While some of Allen’s insights into American culture are intriguing—for example, our preference for the practical and our obsession with efficiency certainly ring true—they are not ideally persuasive as presented because of the book’s tendency to ignore too many important issues and scholars. Allen may have read more broadly in the sociology and history of science – as well as in media studies and philosophy—than this presentation of his subject matter implies; if so, he ought to have reflected this reading in what he has written here. A dose of empiricism may be helpful in this context. While it seems to be true (on the basis of most relevant opinion polls) that today’s Americans prefer science that has economic or social benefits (for example, science that creates jobs, health, and wealth), it is also true that Americans continue to like and trust science as well as technology (even while some segments are doubtful about specific points, such as evolution and climate change). If, as Allen apparently takes as his premise, suspicion of all things purely scientific is a peculiarly American cultural

Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence

Abstract: How do poor people cope with, and even make sense of, toxic danger? This book is a ‘‘story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’’ (p. 4). As such, it is distinct from much of the social movement literature, and also the ethnographies of the poor. The dependent variable in the social movement literature is community protest; we find protest, and try to explain its appearance, citing such things as ‘‘cognitive liberation.’’ But what about the many more communities that would seem ripe for protest, but do not? How, in particular, can we explain the ‘‘silent habituation to contamination’’ that is often associated with slum communities? Why the ‘‘perpetuation of ignorance, mistake, and confusion’’ (p. 8) on the part of the residents, despite ample evidence of contamination? The book explores ‘‘the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding, division, and ultimately, inaction in the face of sustained toxic assault’’ (p. 8). ‘‘Uncertainty and ignorance,’’ they claim ‘‘have not been a dominant focus among ethnographers’’ (p. 12). True or not, here the authors explore it in rich detail. The place is a settlement on the edge of Buenos Aires. With two-and-one-half years of intensive fieldwork they have intimate knowledge of the community, and the second author, Debora Swistun, was born and raised in the town, and only left at the end of the fieldwork. Javier Auyero, no stranger to poverty research in Latin America, came in from the University of Texas for long stays. This is an ethnography, loosely structured, and like most ethnographies it is theoretically undernourished. The repeated references to Bourdieuian aphorisms such as ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ ‘‘schemata of perception,’’ ‘‘how domination works,’’ and the curious ‘‘site effects’’ (where ‘‘what is lived and seen on the ground’’ is really ‘‘elsewhere’’) (p. 159) do not structure the argument. The authors’ excellent narratives make it clear that the domination is more material than symbolic, and the pervasiveness of the pollution—air, water, soil—speaks to the silent contamination more strongly than the mechanisms and metaphors in the literature they repeatedly cite. Though much of the material has appeared elsewhere in scholarly journals, where it is more tightly organized, the leisurely pace and intimacy of this presentation has many virtues. Unfortunately, however, the lack of a decent index, so easily constructed on a computer, is not one of them. In addition to its dramatic focus upon ignorance, mistake and confusion in the community, there is a striking emphasis upon the link between environment and misery. Scholars, they say, have remained silent for a long time about environmental factors as the key determinants in the reproduction of destitution and inequity. They see it as the missing dimension in the study of poverty in Latin America. Graphically, and in wrenching detail, they show how the polluted space the urban poor live in compounds the normal problems of poverty. The silent, often invisible, steady accumulation of poisons appears to feed the resignation and displace the blame. It may be the shantytowns of Argentina which have had protests have not had the full environmental assault Flammable has had. The settlement was once an area with many small farms and fruit trees, clean water from a river, and a white-sand beach in the estuary. Gradually, but implacably, it became a hellhole, a toxic dumping ground, surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in the country. The Shell refinery is the biggest, but there is another oil refinery, three plants that store oil, several that store chemical products, one that manufactures chemical products, and a power plant. The settlement expanded into the

Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race

Abstract: Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved

Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History

Abstract: Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved

Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance

Abstract: How do poor people cope with, and even make sense of, toxic danger? This book is a ‘‘story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’’ (p. 4). As such, it is distinct from much of the social movement literature, and also the ethnographies of the poor. The dependent variable in the social movement literature is community protest; we find protest, and try to explain its appearance, citing such things as ‘‘cognitive liberation.’’ But what about the many more communities that would seem ripe for protest, but do not? How, in particular, can we explain the ‘‘silent habituation to contamination’’ that is often associated with slum communities? Why the ‘‘perpetuation of ignorance, mistake, and confusion’’ (p. 8) on the part of the residents, despite ample evidence of contamination? The book explores ‘‘the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding, division, and ultimately, inaction in the face of sustained toxic assault’’ (p. 8). ‘‘Uncertainty and ignorance,’’ they claim ‘‘have not been a dominant focus among ethnographers’’ (p. 12). True or not, here the authors explore it in rich detail. The place is a settlement on the edge of Buenos Aires. With two-and-one-half years of intensive fieldwork they have intimate knowledge of the community, and the second author, Debora Swistun, was born and raised in the town, and only left at the end of the fieldwork. Javier Auyero, no stranger to poverty research in Latin America, came in from the University of Texas for long stays. This is an ethnography, loosely structured, and like most ethnographies it is theoretically undernourished. The repeated references to Bourdieuian aphorisms such as ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ ‘‘schemata of perception,’’ ‘‘how domination works,’’ and the curious ‘‘site effects’’ (where ‘‘what is lived and seen on the ground’’ is really ‘‘elsewhere’’) (p. 159) do not structure the argument. The authors’ excellent narratives make it clear that the domination is more material than symbolic, and the pervasiveness of the pollution—air, water, soil—speaks to the silent contamination more strongly than the mechanisms and metaphors in the literature they repeatedly cite. Though much of the material has appeared elsewhere in scholarly journals, where it is more tightly organized, the leisurely pace and intimacy of this presentation has many virtues. Unfortunately, however, the lack of a decent index, so easily constructed on a computer, is not one of them. In addition to its dramatic focus upon ignorance, mistake and confusion in the community, there is a striking emphasis upon the link between environment and misery. Scholars, they say, have remained silent for a long time about environmental factors as the key determinants in the reproduction of destitution and inequity. They see it as the missing dimension in the study of poverty in Latin America. Graphically, and in wrenching detail, they show how the polluted space the urban poor live in compounds the normal problems of poverty. The silent, often invisible, steady accumulation of poisons appears to feed the resignation and displace the blame. It may be the shantytowns of Argentina which have had protests have not had the full environmental assault Flammable has had. The settlement was once an area with many small farms and fruit trees, clean water from a river, and a white-sand beach in the estuary. Gradually, but implacably, it became a hellhole, a toxic dumping ground, surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in the country. The Shell refinery is the biggest, but there is another oil refinery, three plants that store oil, several that store chemical products, one that manufactures chemical products, and a power plant. The settlement expanded into the

Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance:

Abstract: This book has a catchy title and nice cover art, adding to the reader’s anticipation that it will be an absorbing—and entertaining— read. The price is reasonable, making it potentially attractive as a text. And the book is, in fact, generally quite well written. America’s romance with technology is complicated, contradictory, and confusing, and it certainly deserves more scholarly attention. However, much has already been written on this subject, not enough of which finds its way into the pages of this book. The introduction suggests that its author, fiction writer and English professor Glen Scott Allen, imagines an audience largely unfamiliar with social and cultural studies of science and technology, and tends to leave the impression that he is unfamiliar with much of this work himself. Allen concentrates on what he sees as Americans’ suspicion of the purely scientific, as opposed to the technological, a suspicion that he correctly surmises may have roots in social class distinctions. He reports that in researching this book, he ‘‘began to wonder to what extent . . . American culture [has] shaped American scientific practice’’ (p. 5), as though this were an entirely original question. In Chapter One, he marvels that in 1848 the American Association for the Advancement of Science adopted promotion of the ‘‘purer’’ sciences as its goal (p. 17), and in general implies surprise at his discovery of the social, political, and class-based character of science (although it is not exactly clear how the AAAS vision is an argument that Americans distrust science, instead of an argument that at least some of us approve of it). He discusses the ‘‘selling’’ of American science in Chapter Three without any apparent reference either to the work of sociologist Dorothy Nelkin or to that of media historian Marcel Lafollette, two scholars especially well-known for their careful documentation of how media representations of science and technology have historically served this purpose. Then, in Chapter Four, Allen presents American Pragmatism without reference to John Dewey, who makes only a cameo appearance a few pages later. Surely Dewey’s contribution to Pragmatism would have been an excellent pillar on which to build any argument about American perspectives on practical knowledge. Finally, as a postscript about two pages from the end of the entire work, Allen confesses that two issues ‘‘not specifically addressed in this book are race and gender’’ (p. 260). Struggling to express my reaction to this latter statement in particularly appropriate scholarly language, the phrase that seems to sum it up best is : ‘‘Well, duh!’’ While some of Allen’s insights into American culture are intriguing—for example, our preference for the practical and our obsession with efficiency certainly ring true—they are not ideally persuasive as presented because of the book’s tendency to ignore too many important issues and scholars. Allen may have read more broadly in the sociology and history of science – as well as in media studies and philosophy—than this presentation of his subject matter implies; if so, he ought to have reflected this reading in what he has written here. A dose of empiricism may be helpful in this context. While it seems to be true (on the basis of most relevant opinion polls) that today’s Americans prefer science that has economic or social benefits (for example, science that creates jobs, health, and wealth), it is also true that Americans continue to like and trust science as well as technology (even while some segments are doubtful about specific points, such as evolution and climate change). If, as Allen apparently takes as his premise, suspicion of all things purely scientific is a peculiarly American cultural

The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works

Abstract: Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved

The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform

Abstract: How do poor people cope with, and even make sense of, toxic danger? This book is a ‘‘story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’’ (p. 4). As such, it is distinct from much of the social movement literature, and also the ethnographies of the poor. The dependent variable in the social movement literature is community protest; we find protest, and try to explain its appearance, citing such things as ‘‘cognitive liberation.’’ But what about the many more communities that would seem ripe for protest, but do not? How, in particular, can we explain the ‘‘silent habituation to contamination’’ that is often associated with slum communities? Why the ‘‘perpetuation of ignorance, mistake, and confusion’’ (p. 8) on the part of the residents, despite ample evidence of contamination? The book explores ‘‘the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding, division, and ultimately, inaction in the face of sustained toxic assault’’ (p. 8). ‘‘Uncertainty and ignorance,’’ they claim ‘‘have not been a dominant focus among ethnographers’’ (p. 12). True or not, here the authors explore it in rich detail. The place is a settlement on the edge of Buenos Aires. With two-and-one-half years of intensive fieldwork they have intimate knowledge of the community, and the second author, Debora Swistun, was born and raised in the town, and only left at the end of the fieldwork. Javier Auyero, no stranger to poverty research in Latin America, came in from the University of Texas for long stays. This is an ethnography, loosely structured, and like most ethnographies it is theoretically undernourished. The repeated references to Bourdieuian aphorisms such as ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ ‘‘schemata of perception,’’ ‘‘how domination works,’’ and the curious ‘‘site effects’’ (where ‘‘what is lived and seen on the ground’’ is really ‘‘elsewhere’’) (p. 159) do not structure the argument. The authors’ excellent narratives make it clear that the domination is more material than symbolic, and the pervasiveness of the pollution—air, water, soil—speaks to the silent contamination more strongly than the mechanisms and metaphors in the literature they repeatedly cite. Though much of the material has appeared elsewhere in scholarly journals, where it is more tightly organized, the leisurely pace and intimacy of this presentation has many virtues. Unfortunately, however, the lack of a decent index, so easily constructed on a computer, is not one of them. In addition to its dramatic focus upon ignorance, mistake and confusion in the community, there is a striking emphasis upon the link between environment and misery. Scholars, they say, have remained silent for a long time about environmental factors as the key determinants in the reproduction of destitution and inequity. They see it as the missing dimension in the study of poverty in Latin America. Graphically, and in wrenching detail, they show how the polluted space the urban poor live in compounds the normal problems of poverty. The silent, often invisible, steady accumulation of poisons appears to feed the resignation and displace the blame. It may be the shantytowns of Argentina which have had protests have not had the full environmental assault Flammable has had. The settlement was once an area with many small farms and fruit trees, clean water from a river, and a white-sand beach in the estuary. Gradually, but implacably, it became a hellhole, a toxic dumping ground, surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in the country. The Shell refinery is the biggest, but there is another oil refinery, three plants that store oil, several that store chemical products, one that manufactures chemical products, and a power plant. The settlement expanded into the

Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry

Abstract: How do poor people cope with, and even make sense of, toxic danger? This book is a ‘‘story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’’ (p. 4). As such, it is distinct from much of the social movement literature, and also the ethnographies of the poor. The dependent variable in the social movement literature is community protest; we find protest, and try to explain its appearance, citing such things as ‘‘cognitive liberation.’’ But what about the many more communities that would seem ripe for protest, but do not? How, in particular, can we explain the ‘‘silent habituation to contamination’’ that is often associated with slum communities? Why the ‘‘perpetuation of ignorance, mistake, and confusion’’ (p. 8) on the part of the residents, despite ample evidence of contamination? The book explores ‘‘the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding, division, and ultimately, inaction in the face of sustained toxic assault’’ (p. 8). ‘‘Uncertainty and ignorance,’’ they claim ‘‘have not been a dominant focus among ethnographers’’ (p. 12). True or not, here the authors explore it in rich detail. The place is a settlement on the edge of Buenos Aires. With two-and-one-half years of intensive fieldwork they have intimate knowledge of the community, and the second author, Debora Swistun, was born and raised in the town, and only left at the end of the fieldwork. Javier Auyero, no stranger to poverty research in Latin America, came in from the University of Texas for long stays. This is an ethnography, loosely structured, and like most ethnographies it is theoretically undernourished. The repeated references to Bourdieuian aphorisms such as ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ ‘‘schemata of perception,’’ ‘‘how domination works,’’ and the curious ‘‘site effects’’ (where ‘‘what is lived and seen on the ground’’ is really ‘‘elsewhere’’) (p. 159) do not structure the argument. The authors’ excellent narratives make it clear that the domination is more material than symbolic, and the pervasiveness of the pollution—air, water, soil—speaks to the silent contamination more strongly than the mechanisms and metaphors in the literature they repeatedly cite. Though much of the material has appeared elsewhere in scholarly journals, where it is more tightly organized, the leisurely pace and intimacy of this presentation has many virtues. Unfortunately, however, the lack of a decent index, so easily constructed on a computer, is not one of them. In addition to its dramatic focus upon ignorance, mistake and confusion in the community, there is a striking emphasis upon the link between environment and misery. Scholars, they say, have remained silent for a long time about environmental factors as the key determinants in the reproduction of destitution and inequity. They see it as the missing dimension in the study of poverty in Latin America. Graphically, and in wrenching detail, they show how the polluted space the urban poor live in compounds the normal problems of poverty. The silent, often invisible, steady accumulation of poisons appears to feed the resignation and displace the blame. It may be the shantytowns of Argentina which have had protests have not had the full environmental assault Flammable has had. The settlement was once an area with many small farms and fruit trees, clean water from a river, and a white-sand beach in the estuary. Gradually, but implacably, it became a hellhole, a toxic dumping ground, surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in the country. The Shell refinery is the biggest, but there is another oil refinery, three plants that store oil, several that store chemical products, one that manufactures chemical products, and a power plant. The settlement expanded into the

How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism

Abstract: Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved

Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion: Potentials and Challenges of Diversity

Abstract: Anarchy as Order is the third in a series of related books by Mohammed Bamyeh. Framed most broadly, Anarchy as Order explores that myriad of issues and contestations associated with moving from a society based on ‘‘an imposed order’’ to a society premised on ‘‘an unimposed order.’’ Substantively, this is an elaboration of the theoretical scaffolding Bamyeh began building in these earlier works. This is an essential consideration for the reader at times, because rather than a sustained, conventional engagement with the contemporary anarchist literature, Bamyeh elects in this book to expand further upon notions that were either introduced or at least hinted at in his previous works. (For instance, there are only three or four references to anarchist works published since 1993, while eight of the author’s works are cited.) This can be a fruitful approach that deepens one’s analysis and understanding of the author’s interpretation of anarchy as an unimposed order, but it also places certain obligations on the reader to consider a range of concepts in the broader context of debates that Bamyeh has explored more fully elsewhere. The principle merits of this work concern the author’s serious and considered effort to engage the profoundly difficult task of imagining a society based on unimposed order, while we remain necessarily locked within the analytical and conceptual limitations that reflect our everyday experiences with a society based on imposed order. In this regard, Bamyeh’s challenge is two-fold. First he must develop a language to describe such a society and second he must provide a plausible explanation of possible transitions to such a society. He takes on both of these to varying degrees of success. Where he falters, however, this is primarily a consequence of the inherent conceptual difficulty of presenting and analyzing any vision of a society that remains yet-in-formation. To describe a society based on unimposed order, Bamyeh deploys two basic strategies. First, by way of illustration, he cites cases of anarchy that arise historically (and spontaneously) within the fabric of a society based on imposed order. In the selection and description of cases there is a strong existentialist influence that shapes Bamyeh’s account. Somewhat problematically, however, this existentialist framework is never explicitly detailed and, thus, must be understood as having been earlier introduced in Of Death and Dominion. In fact, the existentialist premises of Bamyeh’s work are essential to understanding his notion of self-development that drives an individual’s pursuit and realization of freedom through the occasional and ongoing creation of anarchist spaces and the continual reorganization of social institutions that follows from this. For Bamyeh, this notion of self-development appears to be an almost exclusively organic process that follows from what it means to be an individual in mass society—regardless of the specific details of that mass society. The second strategy of Bamyeh is to describe a society based on unimposed order by providing a type of counter description of such a society via a series of contrasts with societies based on imposed order. Recognizing the inherent difficulties of presenting a transparent vision of a society whose premises for being remain in a yet-to-be realized set of social conditions and conceptual categories, Bamyeh leads the reader through a detailed account of various conceptual categories of social organization derived from a society based on imposed order and provides an alternative understanding of these same categories as they might be experienced in a society based on unimposed order. These conceptual categories include civil society, the common good, self-will, commitment, and freedom. As a general strategy this strikes me as a plausible and

Dangerous Exits: Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America:

Abstract: This book has a catchy title and nice cover art, adding to the reader’s anticipation that it will be an absorbing—and entertaining— read. The price is reasonable, making it potentially attractive as a text. And the book is, in fact, generally quite well written. America’s romance with technology is complicated, contradictory, and confusing, and it certainly deserves more scholarly attention. However, much has already been written on this subject, not enough of which finds its way into the pages of this book. The introduction suggests that its author, fiction writer and English professor Glen Scott Allen, imagines an audience largely unfamiliar with social and cultural studies of science and technology, and tends to leave the impression that he is unfamiliar with much of this work himself. Allen concentrates on what he sees as Americans’ suspicion of the purely scientific, as opposed to the technological, a suspicion that he correctly surmises may have roots in social class distinctions. He reports that in researching this book, he ‘‘began to wonder to what extent . . . American culture [has] shaped American scientific practice’’ (p. 5), as though this were an entirely original question. In Chapter One, he marvels that in 1848 the American Association for the Advancement of Science adopted promotion of the ‘‘purer’’ sciences as its goal (p. 17), and in general implies surprise at his discovery of the social, political, and class-based character of science (although it is not exactly clear how the AAAS vision is an argument that Americans distrust science, instead of an argument that at least some of us approve of it). He discusses the ‘‘selling’’ of American science in Chapter Three without any apparent reference either to the work of sociologist Dorothy Nelkin or to that of media historian Marcel Lafollette, two scholars especially well-known for their careful documentation of how media representations of science and technology have historically served this purpose. Then, in Chapter Four, Allen presents American Pragmatism without reference to John Dewey, who makes only a cameo appearance a few pages later. Surely Dewey’s contribution to Pragmatism would have been an excellent pillar on which to build any argument about American perspectives on practical knowledge. Finally, as a postscript about two pages from the end of the entire work, Allen confesses that two issues ‘‘not specifically addressed in this book are race and gender’’ (p. 260). Struggling to express my reaction to this latter statement in particularly appropriate scholarly language, the phrase that seems to sum it up best is : ‘‘Well, duh!’’ While some of Allen’s insights into American culture are intriguing—for example, our preference for the practical and our obsession with efficiency certainly ring true—they are not ideally persuasive as presented because of the book’s tendency to ignore too many important issues and scholars. Allen may have read more broadly in the sociology and history of science – as well as in media studies and philosophy—than this presentation of his subject matter implies; if so, he ought to have reflected this reading in what he has written here. A dose of empiricism may be helpful in this context. While it seems to be true (on the basis of most relevant opinion polls) that today’s Americans prefer science that has economic or social benefits (for example, science that creates jobs, health, and wealth), it is also true that Americans continue to like and trust science as well as technology (even while some segments are doubtful about specific points, such as evolution and climate change). If, as Allen apparently takes as his premise, suspicion of all things purely scientific is a peculiarly American cultural

Observing BioethicsObserving Bioethics, by FoxRenée C.SwazeyJudith P.. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 388pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780195365559.

Abstract: Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved

Social Class in Europe: An Introduction to the European Socio-economic Classification:

Abstract: How do poor people cope with, and even make sense of, toxic danger? This book is a ‘‘story of silent habituation to contamination and of almost complete absence of mass protest against toxic onslaught’’ (p. 4). As such, it is distinct from much of the social movement literature, and also the ethnographies of the poor. The dependent variable in the social movement literature is community protest; we find protest, and try to explain its appearance, citing such things as ‘‘cognitive liberation.’’ But what about the many more communities that would seem ripe for protest, but do not? How, in particular, can we explain the ‘‘silent habituation to contamination’’ that is often associated with slum communities? Why the ‘‘perpetuation of ignorance, mistake, and confusion’’ (p. 8) on the part of the residents, despite ample evidence of contamination? The book explores ‘‘the reproduction of uncertainty, misunderstanding, division, and ultimately, inaction in the face of sustained toxic assault’’ (p. 8). ‘‘Uncertainty and ignorance,’’ they claim ‘‘have not been a dominant focus among ethnographers’’ (p. 12). True or not, here the authors explore it in rich detail. The place is a settlement on the edge of Buenos Aires. With two-and-one-half years of intensive fieldwork they have intimate knowledge of the community, and the second author, Debora Swistun, was born and raised in the town, and only left at the end of the fieldwork. Javier Auyero, no stranger to poverty research in Latin America, came in from the University of Texas for long stays. This is an ethnography, loosely structured, and like most ethnographies it is theoretically undernourished. The repeated references to Bourdieuian aphorisms such as ‘‘symbolic violence,’’ ‘‘schemata of perception,’’ ‘‘how domination works,’’ and the curious ‘‘site effects’’ (where ‘‘what is lived and seen on the ground’’ is really ‘‘elsewhere’’) (p. 159) do not structure the argument. The authors’ excellent narratives make it clear that the domination is more material than symbolic, and the pervasiveness of the pollution—air, water, soil—speaks to the silent contamination more strongly than the mechanisms and metaphors in the literature they repeatedly cite. Though much of the material has appeared elsewhere in scholarly journals, where it is more tightly organized, the leisurely pace and intimacy of this presentation has many virtues. Unfortunately, however, the lack of a decent index, so easily constructed on a computer, is not one of them. In addition to its dramatic focus upon ignorance, mistake and confusion in the community, there is a striking emphasis upon the link between environment and misery. Scholars, they say, have remained silent for a long time about environmental factors as the key determinants in the reproduction of destitution and inequity. They see it as the missing dimension in the study of poverty in Latin America. Graphically, and in wrenching detail, they show how the polluted space the urban poor live in compounds the normal problems of poverty. The silent, often invisible, steady accumulation of poisons appears to feed the resignation and displace the blame. It may be the shantytowns of Argentina which have had protests have not had the full environmental assault Flammable has had. The settlement was once an area with many small farms and fruit trees, clean water from a river, and a white-sand beach in the estuary. Gradually, but implacably, it became a hellhole, a toxic dumping ground, surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in the country. The Shell refinery is the biggest, but there is another oil refinery, three plants that store oil, several that store chemical products, one that manufactures chemical products, and a power plant. The settlement expanded into the

The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today

Abstract: This book has a catchy title and nice cover art, adding to the reader’s anticipation that it will be an absorbing—and entertaining— read. The price is reasonable, making it potentially attractive as a text. And the book is, in fact, generally quite well written. America’s romance with technology is complicated, contradictory, and confusing, and it certainly deserves more scholarly attention. However, much has already been written on this subject, not enough of which finds its way into the pages of this book. The introduction suggests that its author, fiction writer and English professor Glen Scott Allen, imagines an audience largely unfamiliar with social and cultural studies of science and technology, and tends to leave the impression that he is unfamiliar with much of this work himself. Allen concentrates on what he sees as Americans’ suspicion of the purely scientific, as opposed to the technological, a suspicion that he correctly surmises may have roots in social class distinctions. He reports that in researching this book, he ‘‘began to wonder to what extent . . . American culture [has] shaped American scientific practice’’ (p. 5), as though this were an entirely original question. In Chapter One, he marvels that in 1848 the American Association for the Advancement of Science adopted promotion of the ‘‘purer’’ sciences as its goal (p. 17), and in general implies surprise at his discovery of the social, political, and class-based character of science (although it is not exactly clear how the AAAS vision is an argument that Americans distrust science, instead of an argument that at least some of us approve of it). He discusses the ‘‘selling’’ of American science in Chapter Three without any apparent reference either to the work of sociologist Dorothy Nelkin or to that of media historian Marcel Lafollette, two scholars especially well-known for their careful documentation of how media representations of science and technology have historically served this purpose. Then, in Chapter Four, Allen presents American Pragmatism without reference to John Dewey, who makes only a cameo appearance a few pages later. Surely Dewey’s contribution to Pragmatism would have been an excellent pillar on which to build any argument about American perspectives on practical knowledge. Finally, as a postscript about two pages from the end of the entire work, Allen confesses that two issues ‘‘not specifically addressed in this book are race and gender’’ (p. 260). Struggling to express my reaction to this latter statement in particularly appropriate scholarly language, the phrase that seems to sum it up best is : ‘‘Well, duh!’’ While some of Allen’s insights into American culture are intriguing—for example, our preference for the practical and our obsession with efficiency certainly ring true—they are not ideally persuasive as presented because of the book’s tendency to ignore too many important issues and scholars. Allen may have read more broadly in the sociology and history of science – as well as in media studies and philosophy—than this presentation of his subject matter implies; if so, he ought to have reflected this reading in what he has written here. A dose of empiricism may be helpful in this context. While it seems to be true (on the basis of most relevant opinion polls) that today’s Americans prefer science that has economic or social benefits (for example, science that creates jobs, health, and wealth), it is also true that Americans continue to like and trust science as well as technology (even while some segments are doubtful about specific points, such as evolution and climate change). If, as Allen apparently takes as his premise, suspicion of all things purely scientific is a peculiarly American cultural

Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal

Abstract: This book has a catchy title and nice cover art, adding to the reader’s anticipation that it will be an absorbing—and entertaining— read. The price is reasonable, making it potentially attractive as a text. And the book is, in fact, generally quite well written. America’s romance with technology is complicated, contradictory, and confusing, and it certainly deserves more scholarly attention. However, much has already been written on this subject, not enough of which finds its way into the pages of this book. The introduction suggests that its author, fiction writer and English professor Glen Scott Allen, imagines an audience largely unfamiliar with social and cultural studies of science and technology, and tends to leave the impression that he is unfamiliar with much of this work himself. Allen concentrates on what he sees as Americans’ suspicion of the purely scientific, as opposed to the technological, a suspicion that he correctly surmises may have roots in social class distinctions. He reports that in researching this book, he ‘‘began to wonder to what extent . . . American culture [has] shaped American scientific practice’’ (p. 5), as though this were an entirely original question. In Chapter One, he marvels that in 1848 the American Association for the Advancement of Science adopted promotion of the ‘‘purer’’ sciences as its goal (p. 17), and in general implies surprise at his discovery of the social, political, and class-based character of science (although it is not exactly clear how the AAAS vision is an argument that Americans distrust science, instead of an argument that at least some of us approve of it). He discusses the ‘‘selling’’ of American science in Chapter Three without any apparent reference either to the work of sociologist Dorothy Nelkin or to that of media historian Marcel Lafollette, two scholars especially well-known for their careful documentation of how media representations of science and technology have historically served this purpose. Then, in Chapter Four, Allen presents American Pragmatism without reference to John Dewey, who makes only a cameo appearance a few pages later. Surely Dewey’s contribution to Pragmatism would have been an excellent pillar on which to build any argument about American perspectives on practical knowledge. Finally, as a postscript about two pages from the end of the entire work, Allen confesses that two issues ‘‘not specifically addressed in this book are race and gender’’ (p. 260). Struggling to express my reaction to this latter statement in particularly appropriate scholarly language, the phrase that seems to sum it up best is : ‘‘Well, duh!’’ While some of Allen’s insights into American culture are intriguing—for example, our preference for the practical and our obsession with efficiency certainly ring true—they are not ideally persuasive as presented because of the book’s tendency to ignore too many important issues and scholars. Allen may have read more broadly in the sociology and history of science – as well as in media studies and philosophy—than this presentation of his subject matter implies; if so, he ought to have reflected this reading in what he has written here. A dose of empiricism may be helpful in this context. While it seems to be true (on the basis of most relevant opinion polls) that today’s Americans prefer science that has economic or social benefits (for example, science that creates jobs, health, and wealth), it is also true that Americans continue to like and trust science as well as technology (even while some segments are doubtful about specific points, such as evolution and climate change). If, as Allen apparently takes as his premise, suspicion of all things purely scientific is a peculiarly American cultural

Social Capital: An International Research Program:

Abstract: Nancy Abelmann’s book, The Intimate University, reveals stories of Korean American students at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign, where she has been teaching for many years. She indicates that the American public image of Korean and other Asian Americans is that of model minorities whose racial characteristics do not have a negative effect on their academic achievements and socioeconomic mobility. But she shows that Korean American students, the largest ethnic group at the university, are socially segregated, which dogs the liberal promise of the university emphasizing the ideology of multiculturalism. The author points out that at the time she started the book project, a journalist contacted her to complete an article about Korean students’ ‘‘self-segregation’’ for Time magazine. However, in her view, racism and racial stereotypes are the main sources of Korean students’ social segregation at the university. She is not afraid to point out that the university administration is not concerned about Korean students’ social segregation, which contradicts the ideal of a multicultural education. Thus the main objective of the book is to show that Korean students at the University of Illinois cannot leave the their ethnic ‘‘comfort zone’’ due to racism and racial stereotypes. In addition, Ablemann also shows exceptions to stereotypical images of Asian Americans, associated with the model minority thesis, as ‘‘hardworking and successful,’’ and seeking ‘‘instrumental striving and materialism.’’ Through the voices of several students and some of their parents, she makes clear that both Korean students and their parents also stress the importance of a liberal education. As an anthropologist, Abelmann used ethnographic research as the major research technique for this book. She talked to the student informants about ‘‘how they managed their lives and studies in college; how they envisioned life after college; and when it mattered to them . . . how their families figured in their college lives’’ (p. 4). She took the intergenerational approach, analyzing stories of not only students, but also some of their parents. She took the transnational approach by looking at the parent generation’s history and educational aspirations back in Korea. Although she interviewed over fifty students for this book, each chapter focuses on each of several members of the Han extended family and a few other Korean students. By devoting four of the seven chapters to members of the Han family, including two children, their parents, their cousin and uncle, the author has made the book an intergenerational family study. While three chapters (Chapters Four through Six) respectively focus on each of the male members of the Han family, the last chapter introduces narratives of two immigrant women from the Han extended family to capture women’s concerns and gender issues. The author’s intergenerational and transnational approaches and her focus on family, class and gender bordering South Korea and the United States reflect her ongoing research interest in these topics, reflected in her previous publications. Abelmann is partly successful in dispelling stereotypes of Korean and other Asian Americans associated with the model minority image. Several studies have documented that Korean and other Asian immigrant parents emphasize their children’s achievement and success in school and push their children to choose science, law, medicine and business related to high-paying and high-status careers. These studies and journalistic stereotypes tend to give the general image that Asian immigrant parents and to a less extent Asian American students only emphasize the instrumental value of college education, failing to recognize the value of liberal studies. But this book shows that many Korean students and their parents do

Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing

Abstract: Anarchy as Order is the third in a series of related books by Mohammed Bamyeh. Framed most broadly, Anarchy as Order explores that myriad of issues and contestations associated with moving from a society based on ‘‘an imposed order’’ to a society premised on ‘‘an unimposed order.’’ Substantively, this is an elaboration of the theoretical scaffolding Bamyeh began building in these earlier works. This is an essential consideration for the reader at times, because rather than a sustained, conventional engagement with the contemporary anarchist literature, Bamyeh elects in this book to expand further upon notions that were either introduced or at least hinted at in his previous works. (For instance, there are only three or four references to anarchist works published since 1993, while eight of the author’s works are cited.) This can be a fruitful approach that deepens one’s analysis and understanding of the author’s interpretation of anarchy as an unimposed order, but it also places certain obligations on the reader to consider a range of concepts in the broader context of debates that Bamyeh has explored more fully elsewhere. The principle merits of this work concern the author’s serious and considered effort to engage the profoundly difficult task of imagining a society based on unimposed order, while we remain necessarily locked within the analytical and conceptual limitations that reflect our everyday experiences with a society based on imposed order. In this regard, Bamyeh’s challenge is two-fold. First he must develop a language to describe such a society and second he must provide a plausible explanation of possible transitions to such a society. He takes on both of these to varying degrees of success. Where he falters, however, this is primarily a consequence of the inherent conceptual difficulty of presenting and analyzing any vision of a society that remains yet-in-formation. To describe a society based on unimposed order, Bamyeh deploys two basic strategies. First, by way of illustration, he cites cases of anarchy that arise historically (and spontaneously) within the fabric of a society based on imposed order. In the selection and description of cases there is a strong existentialist influence that shapes Bamyeh’s account. Somewhat problematically, however, this existentialist framework is never explicitly detailed and, thus, must be understood as having been earlier introduced in Of Death and Dominion. In fact, the existentialist premises of Bamyeh’s work are essential to understanding his notion of self-development that drives an individual’s pursuit and realization of freedom through the occasional and ongoing creation of anarchist spaces and the continual reorganization of social institutions that follows from this. For Bamyeh, this notion of self-development appears to be an almost exclusively organic process that follows from what it means to be an individual in mass society—regardless of the specific details of that mass society. The second strategy of Bamyeh is to describe a society based on unimposed order by providing a type of counter description of such a society via a series of contrasts with societies based on imposed order. Recognizing the inherent difficulties of presenting a transparent vision of a society whose premises for being remain in a yet-to-be realized set of social conditions and conceptual categories, Bamyeh leads the reader through a detailed account of various conceptual categories of social organization derived from a society based on imposed order and provides an alternative understanding of these same categories as they might be experienced in a society based on unimposed order. These conceptual categories include civil society, the common good, self-will, commitment, and freedom. As a general strategy this strikes me as a plausible and

Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education

Abstract: Nancy Abelmann’s book, The Intimate University, reveals stories of Korean American students at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign, where she has been teaching for many years. She indicates that the American public image of Korean and other Asian Americans is that of model minorities whose racial characteristics do not have a negative effect on their academic achievements and socioeconomic mobility. But she shows that Korean American students, the largest ethnic group at the university, are socially segregated, which dogs the liberal promise of the university emphasizing the ideology of multiculturalism. The author points out that at the time she started the book project, a journalist contacted her to complete an article about Korean students’ ‘‘self-segregation’’ for Time magazine. However, in her view, racism and racial stereotypes are the main sources of Korean students’ social segregation at the university. She is not afraid to point out that the university administration is not concerned about Korean students’ social segregation, which contradicts the ideal of a multicultural education. Thus the main objective of the book is to show that Korean students at the University of Illinois cannot leave the their ethnic ‘‘comfort zone’’ due to racism and racial stereotypes. In addition, Ablemann also shows exceptions to stereotypical images of Asian Americans, associated with the model minority thesis, as ‘‘hardworking and successful,’’ and seeking ‘‘instrumental striving and materialism.’’ Through the voices of several students and some of their parents, she makes clear that both Korean students and their parents also stress the importance of a liberal education. As an anthropologist, Abelmann used ethnographic research as the major research technique for this book. She talked to the student informants about ‘‘how they managed their lives and studies in college; how they envisioned life after college; and when it mattered to them . . . how their families figured in their college lives’’ (p. 4). She took the intergenerational approach, analyzing stories of not only students, but also some of their parents. She took the transnational approach by looking at the parent generation’s history and educational aspirations back in Korea. Although she interviewed over fifty students for this book, each chapter focuses on each of several members of the Han extended family and a few other Korean students. By devoting four of the seven chapters to members of the Han family, including two children, their parents, their cousin and uncle, the author has made the book an intergenerational family study. While three chapters (Chapters Four through Six) respectively focus on each of the male members of the Han family, the last chapter introduces narratives of two immigrant women from the Han extended family to capture women’s concerns and gender issues. The author’s intergenerational and transnational approaches and her focus on family, class and gender bordering South Korea and the United States reflect her ongoing research interest in these topics, reflected in her previous publications. Abelmann is partly successful in dispelling stereotypes of Korean and other Asian Americans associated with the model minority image. Several studies have documented that Korean and other Asian immigrant parents emphasize their children’s achievement and success in school and push their children to choose science, law, medicine and business related to high-paying and high-status careers. These studies and journalistic stereotypes tend to give the general image that Asian immigrant parents and to a less extent Asian American students only emphasize the instrumental value of college education, failing to recognize the value of liberal studies. But this book shows that many Korean students and their parents do

Blockading the Border and Human Rights: The El Paso Operation that Remade Immigration Enforcement

Abstract: Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved

Subprime Nation: American Power, Global Capital, and the Housing Bubble

Abstract: Nancy Abelmann’s book, The Intimate University, reveals stories of Korean American students at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign, where she has been teaching for many years. She indicates that the American public image of Korean and other Asian Americans is that of model minorities whose racial characteristics do not have a negative effect on their academic achievements and socioeconomic mobility. But she shows that Korean American students, the largest ethnic group at the university, are socially segregated, which dogs the liberal promise of the university emphasizing the ideology of multiculturalism. The author points out that at the time she started the book project, a journalist contacted her to complete an article about Korean students’ ‘‘self-segregation’’ for Time magazine. However, in her view, racism and racial stereotypes are the main sources of Korean students’ social segregation at the university. She is not afraid to point out that the university administration is not concerned about Korean students’ social segregation, which contradicts the ideal of a multicultural education. Thus the main objective of the book is to show that Korean students at the University of Illinois cannot leave the their ethnic ‘‘comfort zone’’ due to racism and racial stereotypes. In addition, Ablemann also shows exceptions to stereotypical images of Asian Americans, associated with the model minority thesis, as ‘‘hardworking and successful,’’ and seeking ‘‘instrumental striving and materialism.’’ Through the voices of several students and some of their parents, she makes clear that both Korean students and their parents also stress the importance of a liberal education. As an anthropologist, Abelmann used ethnographic research as the major research technique for this book. She talked to the student informants about ‘‘how they managed their lives and studies in college; how they envisioned life after college; and when it mattered to them . . . how their families figured in their college lives’’ (p. 4). She took the intergenerational approach, analyzing stories of not only students, but also some of their parents. She took the transnational approach by looking at the parent generation’s history and educational aspirations back in Korea. Although she interviewed over fifty students for this book, each chapter focuses on each of several members of the Han extended family and a few other Korean students. By devoting four of the seven chapters to members of the Han family, including two children, their parents, their cousin and uncle, the author has made the book an intergenerational family study. While three chapters (Chapters Four through Six) respectively focus on each of the male members of the Han family, the last chapter introduces narratives of two immigrant women from the Han extended family to capture women’s concerns and gender issues. The author’s intergenerational and transnational approaches and her focus on family, class and gender bordering South Korea and the United States reflect her ongoing research interest in these topics, reflected in her previous publications. Abelmann is partly successful in dispelling stereotypes of Korean and other Asian Americans associated with the model minority image. Several studies have documented that Korean and other Asian immigrant parents emphasize their children’s achievement and success in school and push their children to choose science, law, medicine and business related to high-paying and high-status careers. These studies and journalistic stereotypes tend to give the general image that Asian immigrant parents and to a less extent Asian American students only emphasize the instrumental value of college education, failing to recognize the value of liberal studies. But this book shows that many Korean students and their parents do

Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life:

Abstract: Nancy Abelmann’s book, The Intimate University, reveals stories of Korean American students at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign, where she has been teaching for many years. She indicates that the American public image of Korean and other Asian Americans is that of model minorities whose racial characteristics do not have a negative effect on their academic achievements and socioeconomic mobility. But she shows that Korean American students, the largest ethnic group at the university, are socially segregated, which dogs the liberal promise of the university emphasizing the ideology of multiculturalism. The author points out that at the time she started the book project, a journalist contacted her to complete an article about Korean students’ ‘‘self-segregation’’ for Time magazine. However, in her view, racism and racial stereotypes are the main sources of Korean students’ social segregation at the university. She is not afraid to point out that the university administration is not concerned about Korean students’ social segregation, which contradicts the ideal of a multicultural education. Thus the main objective of the book is to show that Korean students at the University of Illinois cannot leave the their ethnic ‘‘comfort zone’’ due to racism and racial stereotypes. In addition, Ablemann also shows exceptions to stereotypical images of Asian Americans, associated with the model minority thesis, as ‘‘hardworking and successful,’’ and seeking ‘‘instrumental striving and materialism.’’ Through the voices of several students and some of their parents, she makes clear that both Korean students and their parents also stress the importance of a liberal education. As an anthropologist, Abelmann used ethnographic research as the major research technique for this book. She talked to the student informants about ‘‘how they managed their lives and studies in college; how they envisioned life after college; and when it mattered to them . . . how their families figured in their college lives’’ (p. 4). She took the intergenerational approach, analyzing stories of not only students, but also some of their parents. She took the transnational approach by looking at the parent generation’s history and educational aspirations back in Korea. Although she interviewed over fifty students for this book, each chapter focuses on each of several members of the Han extended family and a few other Korean students. By devoting four of the seven chapters to members of the Han family, including two children, their parents, their cousin and uncle, the author has made the book an intergenerational family study. While three chapters (Chapters Four through Six) respectively focus on each of the male members of the Han family, the last chapter introduces narratives of two immigrant women from the Han extended family to capture women’s concerns and gender issues. The author’s intergenerational and transnational approaches and her focus on family, class and gender bordering South Korea and the United States reflect her ongoing research interest in these topics, reflected in her previous publications. Abelmann is partly successful in dispelling stereotypes of Korean and other Asian Americans associated with the model minority image. Several studies have documented that Korean and other Asian immigrant parents emphasize their children’s achievement and success in school and push their children to choose science, law, medicine and business related to high-paying and high-status careers. These studies and journalistic stereotypes tend to give the general image that Asian immigrant parents and to a less extent Asian American students only emphasize the instrumental value of college education, failing to recognize the value of liberal studies. But this book shows that many Korean students and their parents do

When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage:

Abstract: Nancy Abelmann’s book, The Intimate University, reveals stories of Korean American students at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign, where she has been teaching for many years. She indicates that the American public image of Korean and other Asian Americans is that of model minorities whose racial characteristics do not have a negative effect on their academic achievements and socioeconomic mobility. But she shows that Korean American students, the largest ethnic group at the university, are socially segregated, which dogs the liberal promise of the university emphasizing the ideology of multiculturalism. The author points out that at the time she started the book project, a journalist contacted her to complete an article about Korean students’ ‘‘self-segregation’’ for Time magazine. However, in her view, racism and racial stereotypes are the main sources of Korean students’ social segregation at the university. She is not afraid to point out that the university administration is not concerned about Korean students’ social segregation, which contradicts the ideal of a multicultural education. Thus the main objective of the book is to show that Korean students at the University of Illinois cannot leave the their ethnic ‘‘comfort zone’’ due to racism and racial stereotypes. In addition, Ablemann also shows exceptions to stereotypical images of Asian Americans, associated with the model minority thesis, as ‘‘hardworking and successful,’’ and seeking ‘‘instrumental striving and materialism.’’ Through the voices of several students and some of their parents, she makes clear that both Korean students and their parents also stress the importance of a liberal education. As an anthropologist, Abelmann used ethnographic research as the major research technique for this book. She talked to the student informants about ‘‘how they managed their lives and studies in college; how they envisioned life after college; and when it mattered to them . . . how their families figured in their college lives’’ (p. 4). She took the intergenerational approach, analyzing stories of not only students, but also some of their parents. She took the transnational approach by looking at the parent generation’s history and educational aspirations back in Korea. Although she interviewed over fifty students for this book, each chapter focuses on each of several members of the Han extended family and a few other Korean students. By devoting four of the seven chapters to members of the Han family, including two children, their parents, their cousin and uncle, the author has made the book an intergenerational family study. While three chapters (Chapters Four through Six) respectively focus on each of the male members of the Han family, the last chapter introduces narratives of two immigrant women from the Han extended family to capture women’s concerns and gender issues. The author’s intergenerational and transnational approaches and her focus on family, class and gender bordering South Korea and the United States reflect her ongoing research interest in these topics, reflected in her previous publications. Abelmann is partly successful in dispelling stereotypes of Korean and other Asian Americans associated with the model minority image. Several studies have documented that Korean and other Asian immigrant parents emphasize their children’s achievement and success in school and push their children to choose science, law, medicine and business related to high-paying and high-status careers. These studies and journalistic stereotypes tend to give the general image that Asian immigrant parents and to a less extent Asian American students only emphasize the instrumental value of college education, failing to recognize the value of liberal studies. But this book shows that many Korean students and their parents do

The Crash of 2008 and What It Means: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets

Abstract: Nancy Abelmann’s book, The Intimate University, reveals stories of Korean American students at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign, where she has been teaching for many years. She indicates that the American public image of Korean and other Asian Americans is that of model minorities whose racial characteristics do not have a negative effect on their academic achievements and socioeconomic mobility. But she shows that Korean American students, the largest ethnic group at the university, are socially segregated, which dogs the liberal promise of the university emphasizing the ideology of multiculturalism. The author points out that at the time she started the book project, a journalist contacted her to complete an article about Korean students’ ‘‘self-segregation’’ for Time magazine. However, in her view, racism and racial stereotypes are the main sources of Korean students’ social segregation at the university. She is not afraid to point out that the university administration is not concerned about Korean students’ social segregation, which contradicts the ideal of a multicultural education. Thus the main objective of the book is to show that Korean students at the University of Illinois cannot leave the their ethnic ‘‘comfort zone’’ due to racism and racial stereotypes. In addition, Ablemann also shows exceptions to stereotypical images of Asian Americans, associated with the model minority thesis, as ‘‘hardworking and successful,’’ and seeking ‘‘instrumental striving and materialism.’’ Through the voices of several students and some of their parents, she makes clear that both Korean students and their parents also stress the importance of a liberal education. As an anthropologist, Abelmann used ethnographic research as the major research technique for this book. She talked to the student informants about ‘‘how they managed their lives and studies in college; how they envisioned life after college; and when it mattered to them . . . how their families figured in their college lives’’ (p. 4). She took the intergenerational approach, analyzing stories of not only students, but also some of their parents. She took the transnational approach by looking at the parent generation’s history and educational aspirations back in Korea. Although she interviewed over fifty students for this book, each chapter focuses on each of several members of the Han extended family and a few other Korean students. By devoting four of the seven chapters to members of the Han family, including two children, their parents, their cousin and uncle, the author has made the book an intergenerational family study. While three chapters (Chapters Four through Six) respectively focus on each of the male members of the Han family, the last chapter introduces narratives of two immigrant women from the Han extended family to capture women’s concerns and gender issues. The author’s intergenerational and transnational approaches and her focus on family, class and gender bordering South Korea and the United States reflect her ongoing research interest in these topics, reflected in her previous publications. Abelmann is partly successful in dispelling stereotypes of Korean and other Asian Americans associated with the model minority image. Several studies have documented that Korean and other Asian immigrant parents emphasize their children’s achievement and success in school and push their children to choose science, law, medicine and business related to high-paying and high-status careers. These studies and journalistic stereotypes tend to give the general image that Asian immigrant parents and to a less extent Asian American students only emphasize the instrumental value of college education, failing to recognize the value of liberal studies. But this book shows that many Korean students and their parents do

Gendered Tradeoffs: Family, Social Policy, and Economic Inequality in Twenty-One Countries

Abstract: Nancy Abelmann’s book, The Intimate University, reveals stories of Korean American students at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign, where she has been teaching for many years. She indicates that the American public image of Korean and other Asian Americans is that of model minorities whose racial characteristics do not have a negative effect on their academic achievements and socioeconomic mobility. But she shows that Korean American students, the largest ethnic group at the university, are socially segregated, which dogs the liberal promise of the university emphasizing the ideology of multiculturalism. The author points out that at the time she started the book project, a journalist contacted her to complete an article about Korean students’ ‘‘self-segregation’’ for Time magazine. However, in her view, racism and racial stereotypes are the main sources of Korean students’ social segregation at the university. She is not afraid to point out that the university administration is not concerned about Korean students’ social segregation, which contradicts the ideal of a multicultural education. Thus the main objective of the book is to show that Korean students at the University of Illinois cannot leave the their ethnic ‘‘comfort zone’’ due to racism and racial stereotypes. In addition, Ablemann also shows exceptions to stereotypical images of Asian Americans, associated with the model minority thesis, as ‘‘hardworking and successful,’’ and seeking ‘‘instrumental striving and materialism.’’ Through the voices of several students and some of their parents, she makes clear that both Korean students and their parents also stress the importance of a liberal education. As an anthropologist, Abelmann used ethnographic research as the major research technique for this book. She talked to the student informants about ‘‘how they managed their lives and studies in college; how they envisioned life after college; and when it mattered to them . . . how their families figured in their college lives’’ (p. 4). She took the intergenerational approach, analyzing stories of not only students, but also some of their parents. She took the transnational approach by looking at the parent generation’s history and educational aspirations back in Korea. Although she interviewed over fifty students for this book, each chapter focuses on each of several members of the Han extended family and a few other Korean students. By devoting four of the seven chapters to members of the Han family, including two children, their parents, their cousin and uncle, the author has made the book an intergenerational family study. While three chapters (Chapters Four through Six) respectively focus on each of the male members of the Han family, the last chapter introduces narratives of two immigrant women from the Han extended family to capture women’s concerns and gender issues. The author’s intergenerational and transnational approaches and her focus on family, class and gender bordering South Korea and the United States reflect her ongoing research interest in these topics, reflected in her previous publications. Abelmann is partly successful in dispelling stereotypes of Korean and other Asian Americans associated with the model minority image. Several studies have documented that Korean and other Asian immigrant parents emphasize their children’s achievement and success in school and push their children to choose science, law, medicine and business related to high-paying and high-status careers. These studies and journalistic stereotypes tend to give the general image that Asian immigrant parents and to a less extent Asian American students only emphasize the instrumental value of college education, failing to recognize the value of liberal studies. But this book shows that many Korean students and their parents do