Book Reviews: Reviews: Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975: Hypermodern Times: Time: Foundations of National Identity: From Catalonia to Europe: Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture,Film,Photography and the Urban Landscape: The Curious Feminist: Families,Violence and Social Change: Religion,Secularization and Social Change in Wales: Congregational Studies in a Post-Christian Society: Marriage,Gender,and Sex in a Contemporary Chinese Village

For English readers, the lectures which Foucault gave at the College de France between 1971 and 1984 appear extraordinary. He was required to give a lecture once a week based on his ongoing research and these lectures were open to the public. There were no questions at the end of the lecture. As he himself commented ‘My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, [there is] a sensation of total solitude’ (p. xiii). The essays collected here are the transcriptions of the essays which were given between 1974 and 1975. ¹ They do not duplicate material which has been published elsewhere, nor are they sketches for the books, as such; instead they stand as interventions in the analysis of the construction of knowledge/power relations, focusing on the emergence of the abnormal individual from the late eighteenth century onwards. This edition, in addition to the transcription of the lectures, includes brief summaries of the lectures and the text of the lectures which was published after the end of the course where Foucault identified the intentions and objectives of the course. In addition the editors have included biographical and political contextual information. There is also an excellent introduction to the lectures written by Arnold Davidson.

The lectures themselves focus on the figure of the abnormal individual and the way it was constituted through three figures: the human monster, the individual who needed to be corrected or reformed, and the masturbator. Foucault argues that in discussions of abnormality there is a movement from a concentration on the monster in the eighteenth century to a concentration on the masturbator in the nineteenth. His analysis focuses on the way that medical and legal practices determined the construction of particular types of individuals as dangerous and abnormal: his aim is to analyse the ‘soul, the prison of the body’ in a curious but striking inversion of the Platonic notion of the body as the prison of the soul.

In the process of analysing the construction of the abnormal individual, Foucault refines his conception of power, arguing that what he wants to study is ‘the emergence of the power of normalization … the way it has established itself without ever resting on a single institution but by establishing interactions between different institutions’ (p. 26). Similarly, in order to analyse the abnormal individual, he examines contingencies – the way that the development of particular ideas within the legal framework about intentionality and responsibility led to a concern with whether an individual could be said to be responsible for a crime. If the crime could be said to be intentional, then the individual could be prosecuted; if the crime was motiveless, then the individual must be abnormal. In this way, through the analyses of several case studies, Foucault draws attention to the way that abnormality is defined, as those who are not responsible for the crimes they commit. In these case studies he analyses the case notes of child-murderers, child-abusers, hermaphrodites, hysterics and cannibals. These lectures are not just concerned with the construction of abnormality but the way that conceptualising abnormality in particular ways determined the structure and focus of psychiatry, and possibly also criminal law. In this collection of lectures, perhaps far more than anywhere else in his work, he exhibits his interest in psychiatry – much of his early research work was on psychiatry.

Also of interest is Foucault's detailed analysis of the development of the practice of confession within the Catholic church; here he gives far greater detail than he does in The History of Sexuality. ² He refers to advice manuals given to priests and charts the changes within the church from penance to confession. He also notes the way that the confessional booth develops architecturally as a way to address a problem of the need to confess sins without exciting those very sins in either the priest or the waiting faithful. For him, the booth is ‘the material crystallization of all of the rules’ (p. 181).

In The History of Sexuality he also analyses masturbation, but here he gives far more detail of the repressive measures taken in relation to children's sexuality. His argument here is that the bid to eradicate childhood masturbation was seen as a medical intervention and had little to do with sexuality. Masturbation was characterised as leading to illness and death and not to a perverted sexuality. In addition, he shows that this focus on the masturbating child led to a particular focus in psychiatry on the child as the source of future medical and psychic difficulties in adults, which he sees as a ‘trap’ for psychiatry and psychoanalysis as disciplines (p. 304).

He also analyses the way that witchcraft was ‘caught up within the process of Christianization’ (p. 205). For him witchcraft developed in places which were on the peripheries of Christianization. He focuses also on possession and analyses the way that the procedures for dealing with witchcraft were often transferred directly to possession. He examines the case histories of nuns who were possessed and focuses particularly on the way that the convulsion of those possessed served as an ‘important battle between medicine and Catholicism for 250 years’ (p. 213). He argues that ‘the convulsive flesh is the resistance effect of Christianization at the level of individual bodies’ (p. 213). Gradually Foucault notes that rather than convulsive possession, the invasion of the body by the religious spirit, religious experience is transformed into the vision of (distanced) Holy figures.

For me, the strength of these transcriptions of lectures is that you can see Foucault working out certain concepts, taking issue with his own published work and refining some of his positions. His working through of the notion of power/knowledge as productive rather than simply repressive is instructive. There are certain themes which are familiar from his later work but these lectures are often more detailed engagements with case histories than the published work. One of the best aspects of these lectures is that Foucault often works out his ideas in relation to contemporary events; thus, for example, he examines criminal cases which were taking place in France at the time of his lecture and, therefore, the reader has a sense of Foucault engaging with the events which were happening at the time. The reader also has a sense of Foucault back-tracking on his own work, sometimes correcting statements he made in previous weeks, and thus one has an insight into the process of Foucault developing his theoretical ideas.

This collection is an excellent resource for those interested in Foucault's work and makes available a body of work which has only been intermittently referred to and published. Although I have certain qualms about the translation in places (e.g. ‘palpitation’ used instead of ‘palpation’; ‘pederast’ instead of ‘paedophile’; ‘a faithful’ instead of ‘a religious person’ or ‘a member of a religious group’), in general this collection of essays, because it is largely based on transcriptions of public lectures, is far more readable than many of Foucault's works and may help his work reach a wider public.

It is probably good news that the ‘debates’ around the concept of postmodernity have died down. There was some danger that over attention to whether we were living in post or late modern times could impede the more detailed theorisation of the nature of cultural and social change, and the consideration of data and evidence that would contribute to the fuller understanding of important cultural movement. There is no doubt that such theorisations and evidence now exist on a range of topics, producing new understandings of a range of different areas of culture. If this is the case, the intervention represented by Gilles Lipovetsky could be seen negatively, as opening up some old sores and obscuring the detail of sophisticated empirical work in quantitative and qualitative forms. This would especially be the case if the analysis he deploys was simply adopted without critical consideration. More positively, this intervention could be seen as prompting new thoughts on overall cultural change, and reconsideration of the nature of ‘our’ times in the light of less ambitious theorising and empirical evidence.

Hypermodern Times falls into four main parts: an extensive and useful introduction by Sébastien Charles, the main essay – ‘Time Against Time: Or The Hypermodern Society’ by Lipovetsky himself, a conversation between Charles and Lipovetsky, and a Bibliography of Lipovetsky's publications. On a number of levels, Lipovetsky's themes are clear. His argument is that ‘we’ (often using French evidence, but by implication advanced Western democracies) have entered into a new phase of cultural and social life. The postmodern, which is not analysed or described in any detail, has been left behind by the hypermodern. It many respects, in this argument the postmodern was a transitional phase between the modernity of the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, and the hypermodern that has developed since the 1980s. The postmodern therefore has enabled the birth of the hypermodern from the modern. The hypermodern exists in continuity with the modern, through the continuing working out of three key areas or processes: ‘the market, technocratic efficiency and the individual’ (p. 32).

While he discusses all three, it is with the consideration of what in his introduction, Charles labels ‘paradoxical individualism’ that Lipovetsky is most at home. In my view this forms the core of his argument, as it is the mode of individualism that captures the nature and dynamic of hypermodernity. The form and content of such hyperindividualism are summarised by Lipovetsky in a further three themes, which he says describe a ‘society of fashion’: ‘ephemerality, novelty and permanent seduction’ (p. 36). Lipovetsky's discussion here draws significantly on his earlier work on fashion (Lipovetsky, 1994). In the earlier book Lipovetsky considers the meaning of fashion, the periodisation of its development, but most importantly how the processes involved in the changing modes of fashion as dress have become generalised to become the epitome of contemporary cultural and social life. The processes involved in fashion have become extended across many spheres. In his earlier work, he referred to this as ‘consummate fashion’ and saw it through the lens of the three similar processes of ‘ephemerality, seduction, and marginal differentiation’ (1994: 131).

As fashion has democratised, and has spread as a principle it has allowed the individual freedom to define who they are, to consume more and a greater variety of goods and services. It has also meant that the individual has become more reflexive, able to choose outside tradition and constraint how they perform who they are and how they attach themselves to political movements. In The Empire of Fashion and Hypermodern Times, Lipovetsky ranges wide across regions of social life to show how these processes are working out in different fields. In addition, in Hypermodern Times he revisits discussions of risk and anxiety and points to the paradoxes involved.

On a number of levels, for any reader of cultural and social theory this may appear as rather familiar. However, it can be suggested that the most innovative part of Lipovetsky's analysis rests with his consideration of the paradoxes of hypermodernity and hyperindividualism. For the hyperindividualism of the hypermodern as characterised by fashion is double edged, ‘we’ are both disciplined and free, and we constrain ourselves but assert our individualism. In further individualising then, society is not becoming simply atomised, with no connections between people, but the nature of the connections are becoming more contingent and subject to ongoing change and lack of constraint. Social capital, to adopt a term that Lipovetsky would not use, given his critiques of Bourdieu, is fluid in this sense. Both Charles in his introduction to Hypermodern Times and Richard Sennett in his foreword to The Empire of Fashion point to the implications of this argument for politics, in that it makes political attachment more contingent and also in Lipovetsky's argument makes democracy work as in a sense it is more like a marketplace of choices. This is not a disciplined or one-dimensional culture, individualism, or politics.

This seems to capture the strength of Hypermodern Times. It allows for a paradoxical (hyper) modernity in a way that is reminiscent of the way in which Marshall Berman (1983) so vividly captured the paradoxes of modernity in All That is Solid Melts into Air. While Berman's paradox (between progress and loss) is different, it allowed examination of culture and society as a dynamic, much like Lipovetsky. His approach to my mind has much therefore to recommend it. Of course, there are huge problems: the argument lacks precision, it works at points through allusion, the ‘we’ is assumed; the evidence is scattergun, not argued and so on. However, it does suggest a way of considering the formulation and reformation of ‘real’ social groupings of hyper-individuals without a leap to a critique or celebration of the times. It cannot, of course, be left there, but this book provides a further and thought-provoking stimulus to theorization and empirical work that was perhaps also provided by the concept of postmodernity twenty-five years ago. Provided that this does not get hung up in debate about how such terms are to be defined, it could aid further understanding of a range of social and cultural processes.

Cultural understandings of time vary profoundly, and these variations have important social and economic implications. There is no simple answer to the question, ‘What is time?’ because perspectives framed in terms of the linear measurement of clock-time are fundamentally different from analyses that take the rhythmic character of time as their starting point, and these are merely two among the many vantage points that can be adopted. The multi-faceted character of time is nicely captured in Barbara Adam's statement that ‘our experience of time is seething with differences’ (p. 116). That said, modern conceptions of time have rapidly become established to the point at which alternatives occupy only a marginal position in contemporary culture. Adam's stated purpose is the laudable one of seeking a hearing for these other ways of thinking. She states that she has ‘sought to render the distant close and the strange familiar’ (p. 151). In the process, taken-for-granted ideas about time are necessarily brought into question, although it is no easy task to persuade people of this in a situation where ‘clock time permeates the key institutions of industrial society’ (p. 139).

Adam's overview of the field is ambitious in a number of respects. The list of disciplines drawn upon in the book is worth giving in full, since few scholars are in a position to use materials from such a range as Adam identifies: ‘archaeologists and archaeoastronomers, anthropologists and architects, empirical sociologists and geographers, historians and religious scholars, literary theorists and social psychologists, mathematicians and philosophers’ (pp. 1–2). Her remarkable grasp of these diverse literatures and their interconnections allows Adam to construct an interdisciplinary account with rare aplomb. A second sense in which the book is ambitious is in terms of the ground it seeks to cover, given that no previous knowledge of the field on the part of the reader is assumed. In this respect the style may be regarded as unduly condensed. The full implications of arguments may be lost on audience members who do not, for example, bring with them knowledge that the French Revolution involved replacement of the seven-day week with units of ten days and re-naming of the months with seasonally-appropriate designations such as Brumaire, the foggy month. Adam's brief mention of how ‘France and Russia, during the eighteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, attempted to change the Gregorian calendar to suit their revolutionary political systems’ (p. 111) can only allude to the fundamental character of this short-lived effort to unseat tradition. Readers wanting to know more about this are directed in a footnote to Zerubavel's work on the subject. That said, the size constraints on contributors to series such as the Key Concepts of which Adam's book is a part inevitably impose a trade-off between breadth and depth, and time is arguably the broadest subject of all.

A third sense in which the book is ambitious is that Adam does not restrict herself to the role of simple narrator above the fray that characterises debates about time. Her book contains a passionate critique of the tendency of industrial society to adopt quick fixes to problems, driven by ‘the what's-in-it-for-us-now approach’ (p. 142). The development of genetically-modified food provides a prime example of how the compression of time horizons can lead to irreversible decisions being taken in the pursuit of short-term gain; the outcomes of GM ‘potentially stretch to the end of time’ (p. 97). This, together with parallel processes in relation to nuclear energy generation with its problematic legacy of radioactive waste, is all part of ‘the industrial hubris’ (p. 147) that embodies the mistaken belief that time can be controlled, created, commodified, compressed, and colonized indefinitely. Of course, these ‘five Cs of industrial time’ (p. 142) have become so much a part of the modern world that belief in their continued progression is understandable, but various indications of their contradictions make such a belief increasingly untenable. In the global economy, for example, time compression in electronic financial transactions has reached the point at which ‘the increase in mastery is accompanied by a decrease in control’ (p. 146), further confirming (amongst other things) Max Weber's fears about the irrationalities of rationalization.

Adam's account includes brief but useful introductions to the ways in which sociologists from the founding figures onwards have engaged creatively with the problems of time. Adam points out that the reformulation of Durkheim's ideas by his followers into a social constructivist account loses sight of his more subtle theorization of ‘the connection between the social and the natural realms’ (p. 48). She argues that it is also worth revisiting what Marx and Weber had to say about time because of the suggestiveness of these ideas and the influence that they have had on subsequent debates. These traditions of thought do not sit easily alongside the more mythological understandings of time that are treated as equally deserving of attention. Adam argues that what she calls ‘the industrial timescape’ (p. 145) is too narrowly focused on conceptions of time as measurable, predictable and controllable, and that the limitations of this way of thinking require us to re-engage with the broader questions of ‘collective life and death, origin and destiny’ (p. 147) that lie at the heart of mythological ‘time stories’ (p. 6). Given the emphasis that Adam's concluding remarks attach to ‘the power of naming’ (p. 152) it is curious that at several points in her book she refers to ‘the industrial way of life’ (pp. 69, 73, 146) but only hints at how its emerging successor might best be characterised. Reference to the contemporary ‘human-technology-science-economy-equity-environment constellation’ (p. 134) is one possibility that is excessively elaborate, however much one appreciates the need to resist ‘overly economized analysis’ (p. 135). Adam's consideration of the work of writers whose approach is ‘speculative’ (p. 136) alongside ideas grounded in more conventional scientific methodologies reinforces her message about the openness of the future, and ought to provoke a lively response about the nature and limits of interdisciplinarity as well as about the most appropriate ways of thinking about time.

Catalonia is the ideal of the European stateless nation, making it both irresistible and risky as the study case for analysing modern nationalism. Its history has been so mythologised that the ideal Catalonia never quite matches up with the real one, let alone with any of the other stateless nations that look to it as their model. But if anyone is equipped to make a good job of such a study, Josep Llobera is. He was born in Cuba, grew up in Catalonia and emigrated in 1969 to England, where, after training in anthropology, he lectured in sociology and published extensively on nationalism in theory and in European practice, his best known work being his 1994 book The God of Modernity.

Llobera's international and interdisciplinary life experience has left him with a richness of perspectives, an ability to inhabit various political and intellectual points of view and to put across the essence of each without committing himself wholly to any. As a result he writes the sort of book which, with some provisos to be discussed below, I would happily give my students to read. It explores the rich complexity of nationalism, locating that complexity at the level of ideas clearly stated, rather than in discipline-specific terminology designed for superficial memorisation and reproduction. From his Catalan roots and early flirtation with Marxism he retains an evident antipathy to the traditional transnational state, and, like many in the wake of 1989–91, he translated that antipathy into a pro-Europeanism. The idea of Brussels as an omniscient and benevolent central modernising force that would sweep away all ancient historical iniquities must have appealed to him not just as a Catalan but as someone educated by Jesuits in Franco-era Barcelona.

The sub-title to this book neatly encapsulates its central premise, which is that nationalism is not fading away, as some believe, but transforming itself into smaller ethno-nationalisms like the Catalan one, under the umbrella of an emerging larger European identity. From Llobera's perspective, this is a novel, non-majority view of the current situation. Of course things look different depending on where one sits, in terms both of academic field and of lived experience, and for me, that perspective was the consensus view of the majority both inside and outside academia in the 1990s, and has been in steep decline since. In Scotland and Wales, devolution has marginalised the Celtic nationalist parties since 1999 to a far greater extent than anyone predicted; while in England, the 78% vote against establishing a North East Regional Assembly in November 2004 made clear that further devolution was not deemed worth the care and feeding of still more politicians. On the continent, meanwhile, the eastward expansion of the EU in May 2004 quickly led to tensions in the west, gradually turning the tide of opinion against Brussels until the draft EU Constitution was rejected by 55% of French voters in May 2005.

Llobera's ten chapters each approach the question of nationalism from different though contingent directions. Chapter 1 gives a résumé-cum-analysis of the modern history of Catalonia and Catalan nationality. Chapter 2 compares Catalan and Polish ‘national sentiments’ – a key term for Llobera, who locates the ‘ultimate reality’ of nationalism in ‘the subjective feelings or sentiments of ethnic and national identity, along with the concomitant elements of consciousness’ (Llobera, 1987: 21, quoted here on p. 26). Chapter 3 brings the core anthropological category of kinship, as a construct tied to territory and religion, to bear on the understanding of Catalan identity. Chapter 4 looks at ‘national character’, and specifically how the myth of a Catalan character was formed in opposition to perceptions of the Castilian one. Chapter 5 focuses on the role of language in national identities within the UK and the Francophone world – too superficially for my tastes, but then I am a linguist, and perhaps not well placed to judge what the general student of nationalism needs by way of introduction. Chapter 6 deals with that most problematic of concepts, culture, drawing usefully on the views of Gellner and Wallerstein and considering the status of European and global culture, along with issues of cultural imperialism and hybridity. Chapter 7 is a meaty yet very readable analysis of the role of historical memory in the construction of Catalan identity, including the part played by such ‘banal’ texts as the names of streets and topographic sites.

The last three chapters veer in a somewhat different direction. Chapter 8 asks ‘Does Nationalism Inevitably Lead to Conflict and Violence?’ (answer: no), while chapter 10 bills itself as ‘A Theoretical Closure’, but is not markedly more theoretical than what precedes, simply offering a bit more on the history of ideas about nationalism, and making for an effective coda to the book. Chapter 9, ‘The Future of Nations in a United Europe’, is really its climax and in many ways the key chapter, since the book's central thesis seems to be that ‘nationalism is not disappearing but has taken on a different form. What we are experiencing is an increasing autonomy of ethnonations, ie nations without a state, in the wake of a weakening of the multinational states and the transfer of their sovereignty upwards, in the case of Europe to the federation of the European Union, and downwards to the “ethnonations“’ (from the back cover).

In light of the events of recent years, this appears short-sighted, as though the author is portraying things as they were and as he wants them to be, rather than as they are. In fact, though, the views expressed in chapter 9 are considerably more nuanced and realistic than this blurb would suggest. The problem is that they all fall out from the premise stated at the start of the chapter, ‘As the European Union moves inexorably towards higher levels of economic, political and cultural integration …’ (p. 159). Llobera cogently considers the various forms of tight and loose federalism or commonwealth that might emerge from this state of affairs, but never questions the premise itself. Possibly the rejection of the EU Constitution is a temporary setback, and in a few more years it will again be possible to say what Llobera does on p. 159 without qualification. But I am prepared to bet him £50 that this will not be the case – the price, as it happens, of this book plus today's newspaper.

There is no doubt that Los Angeles has loomed large in the imaginations of consumers of popular culture and urban geographers alike. Paris is identified as the archetypal early modern city and New York its successor as most representative of later modernity, whereas LA has been posited as the exemplary postmodern city. Most famously, Ed Soja has identified LA as a key postmodern site, possessing no centre and shaped by globalisation, post-Fordism, intensified regulation and segmentation, and the profusion of hyperreal effects. Some have taken Soja's trends and suggested that they herald a common future of cities everywhere, a rather presumptuous assertion that parallels those ethnocentric assertions common to many theories about globalisation which contend that the world is becoming a homogeneous Euro-American realm. There are, of course, numerous postmodern forms of urban living yet these prophetic suggestions testify to the cultural power embodied in the welter of mediated representations surrounding the city of angels.

There is a danger that in focusing upon urban mega-trends and paradigms characteristic of this particular city that are supposedly exemplary of global urban processes, that the everyday urban life and spaces of the city itself become lost. Luckily, as an antidote to these tendencies, Mike Davis has dispelled over-general and utopian representations of the city by excavating a litany of specific problems associated with LA, including the social and racial divisions, economic exploitation, militarised policing strategies, town hall corruption and ecological devastation.

Everyone will have their own impression of the city, and like many others, my first impression upon arriving in LA was that it was eerily familiar, no doubt because images of its freeways, hills and suburbs had been burned into my imagination via television and film. After unpacking my bags in a suburban house in West Hollywood, and naively excited at the prospect of exploring a new city, I borrowed my aunt's bicycle and set off on an unplanned tour around the city. Upon reaching Beverley Hills, I marvelled at the houses of wealthy celebrities, as you do, but upon reaching a particularly steep bend in what was ostensibly a public highway, I was confronted by a hefty, cubic presence who told me to turn around and make my way back. ‘Miss Bette Midler does not want your sort around here’, he announced, and to stifle any protests, moved his jacket aside, revealing the gleaming firearm in his holster. After half an hour moving in the opposite direction I was once again summoned to the side of the road by two middle aged black men. ‘Motherfucker!’, they yelled, helpfully advising me to ‘get your white ass out of here unless you want to end up dead’. This immediately made explicit to me the racial and class divisions etched upon the city highlighted by Davis. For a European, an awareness of the potential consequences of transgressing such demarcations is quite a shock in its disturbing unfamiliarity.

Los Angeles might be somewhat over-represented in film, fiction and television and yet less mainstream images and stories that make less grandiloquent claims for the city can postulate another city. In the spirit of Davis's commitment to unearthing forgotten inequities and histories, Looking for Los Angeles attempts to uncover other urban processes and identities in its specific focus on photography, film and architecture, highlighting the lost potentialities and alternative futures of the city. The version of Los Angeles presented here is that of the city that could have been. LA has been, and continues to be, a city given to sudden, often ruthless transformations that have entailed the displacement of inhabitants and demolition of buildings, people and structures left behind by a capital-driven, progress-oriented tendency to rarely look back at what has been erased. Yet the testimony in the book reawakens these neglected identities, dispersed communities and forgotten artistic endeavours so that they may talk back to the LA of today.

The key chapter, and certainly the most evocative, is Philip Etherington's depiction of the racially mixed neighbourhoods of LA that were demolished to make way for modernist housing and freeways. Using photographs which superimpose the past upon the present, Etherington brings these past and present environments together, juxtaposing the absent presences of the neighbourhoods of the 1930s with the concrete landscapes of freeways and the very real presences of the contemporary inhabitants of these spaces, the homeless. Becky Nicoliades similarly unearths working class, ethnically mixed housing areas that developed in a somewhat ad hoc fashion and where people grew vegetables or owned livestock on adjacent land. To justify their obliteration to accommodate private real estate development, these communal realms were typified as disorderly and anti-suburban, and as Dana Cuff further elaborates, defenders of these spaces came under suspicion in the McCarthy era

Subsequent chapters focus upon the vexations that arose from embarking on a photographic project featuring young ‘gang-bangers’ in an African American “hood’, a photographic essay of a journey featuring non-spectacular roadside landscapes, and co-operative housing schemes which wilted under the pressures exerted by right-wing political authorities. Others consider cinematic portrayals of the city, showing how the formerly overwhelming concentration upon scenes from the affluent west side of LA which carefully omit drabness and ugliness, have been complemented by the dystopian scenes of urban dysfunctionality and anomie in sci-fi and gangster movies, and further, reveal how these mainstream representations have been challenged by underground radical film-making. A final chapter itemises some of the everyday images through which people mundanely apprehend the city, the utilitarian maps, the repetitive images of palm-trees, freeways, high-rise buildings, mountains and coast found on postcards sold at local stores and in television and newspaper backdrops. Beautifully produced and illustrated, in Looking for Los Angeles, neglected people, mundane autoscapes, ghostly communities, forgotten buildings and ordinary lived experience disrupt the iconic images that so shape perceptions of Los Angeles.

Since I began teaching women's studies, now almost fifteen years ago, I have seldom taught a course without at least one essay or chapter written by Cynthia Enloe. She is able to analyze some of the most important topics connected to the globalization of the capitalist economy and militarization in a way that captures the imagination and critical consciousness of students and scholars alike. The Curious Feminist is a collection of essays on international politics, militarization, and global capitalism that span a decade. While several chapters present new material written exclusively for this book, many of the chapters have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Foreign Policy in Focus, and Review of International Studies and in the academic journals Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and International Feminist Journal of Politics and several edited collections. As in her previous work on gender and international politics, Enloe addresses a diverse set of topics. The Curious Feminist includes chapters on ‘the globetrotting sneaker’, Vietnam's Imperial War Museum, ‘the politics of masculinity and femininity in nationalist wars.’ and ‘women in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq’ as well as more broad-based discussions of ‘how to overcome the underestimation of power in the study of international relations’ and ‘masculinity as a foreign policy issue’. Enloe describes her approach to international politics through the lens of ‘feminist curiosity’ that puts gender into sharp focus. She explains that ‘By taking women seriously in their myriad locations, feminists have been able to see patriarchy when everyone else has seen only capitalism or militarism or racism or imperialism’ (p. 6). Enloe argues for the continued need to keep patriarchy ‘on the analytical couch’ (p. 6). However, she warns, ‘Seeing patriarchy, even misogyny, is not enough. In each instance, we need to know exactly how it works and whether, even if continuing, it has been contested’ (p. 18).

What makes The Curious Feminist stand out from Enloe's previous work is that she puts herself into the text in a way that helps us understand how and why she has developed her unique ability to make ‘feminist sense of international politics’ (Enloe, 2000). She begins to put herself into the frame in her opening chapter and we learn more about Enloe's development as a feminist scholar of international politics and her perspective on her work through the three interviews included in the book. Even more fascinating is her short concluding section entitled ‘Six Pieces for a Work-in-Progress: Playing Checkers with the Troops’, where we learn about the central place of militarism in her early childhood. Here she describes some significant memories growing up in the American suburb of Manhasset, Long Island, during World War II. In many of her books on gender and international politics, Enloe has used photographs to help bring to life the phenomena she considers. She does not exempt her own life from photographic illustration. In a picture taken with her neighborhood friends in 1947, Enloe is shown as a nine or ten-year-old girl wearing a hat her ‘father brought back from Europe as a wartime souvenir’ (p. 309). She describes her effort to explore ‘how the workings of militarization and the ideas about femininity managed to insinuate themselves into this apparently ordinary girlhood’ and calls this effort, ‘a sort of feminist archaeological dig’ (p. 109).

Enloe gives new meaning to ‘the personal is political’ and highlights how it can be simultaneously pedagogical and liberating. Some of the lessons she draws on for her own pedagogical practice will provide feminist fuel for other women's studies and international studies faculty to include in our classrooms. Among the challenges faced by those of us who teach about the lives of women, whether or not we focus on the processes of gender, globalization, and militarization, is to provide a balance between an emphasis on the processes of oppression and resistance strategies. Enloe achieves such a balance in The Curious Feminist. She moves beyond critique and offers ‘a feminist map of the blocks on the road to institutional accountability’ that include challenging ‘the culture (one might even say, cult) of secrecy’, ‘the culture of ‘imminent danger’, and ‘the culture of expertise’ (pp. 234–45). Rather than exclusive focus on the processes that oppress women in different parts of the world, Enloe also highlights the organizing efforts of Korean Women Workers Association (KWWA), of those living around U.S. military bases, and of women victims of sexualized violence, among others. For example, in chapter two, she describes the organizing work of Grupo Rosario Castellanos in Chiapas that, along with other women's organizations, has ‘organized to assess the relationships among patriarchal male practices, the Priista state formula, the Chiapas political economy, and NAFTA’ (p. 38).

Throughout The Curious Feminist Enloe stresses that viewing women in a globalizing context can not be understood by looking at simply the impact of globalization on women. Rather, women at several points have shaped globalization’ (p. 59). She explains that multinational corporations are dependent on women's labor which is made cheap by constructions of femininity that position women primarily as wives, daughters, mothers, and hence, secondary workers. Enloe astutely critiques terminology like ‘cheap labor’ that masks the gender politics involved in ‘cheapening labor’ (p. 60). She also reveals the fallacy of core beliefs associated with militarism that include the belief ‘that armed force is the ultimate resolver of tensions’, and ‘having enemies is a natural condition’ (p. 219). She shows how domestic violence and trafficking in women are rendered invisible within the militaristic view of security. Enloe also challenges the gender values of militarism that women need ‘armed protection’ during ‘times of crisis’ and ‘any man who refuses to engage in armed violent action is jeopardizing his own status as a manly man’ (p. 219). She demonstrates how feminist analysis can be used to uncover these beliefs and other taken-for-granted constructions of femininity and masculinity that naturalize and promote militarization. In so doing feminists can help develop a more effective approach to ‘security’, one that takes into account strategies to protect women, their families and communities, and the environment.

The Curious Feminist will surely prove a valuable resource for those interested in delving further into the links between local gender constructions and international political formations. In my view, it is a rare scholar, one who is committed to feminist pedagogy and activist scholarship, who can clearly and creatively demonstrate the links between large social structural, political and economic processes and women's everyday lives. In fact, Enloe does more than illustrate the links; she persuasively shows how these processes are dependent on women's labor and on patriarchal constructions of gender.

Linda McKie's Families, Violence and Social Change is a courageous attempt to re-engage the study of domestic violence with critical currents within mainstream sociology. Working ‘across the breadth of work on violence, and violence among adults known to each other, in the context of social, cultural, political and economic change’, (p. 4) McKie argues that it is only by paying attention to the ‘lifeword’ (p. 7) that we can begin to make sense of the many violations and abuses perpetrated mostly by men against women. Central to McKie's argument is the notion of an ‘averted gaze’ (p. 31). Most of us, McKie, observes, are ‘unsure about what we should say or do and as a result, become uneasy about intervening’ when we witness a ‘woman who appears to be intimidated, frightened, or even being dragged along a street by a man she seems to know’ (p. 35). What averts our gaze, and makes us so uneasy about intervening, McKie claims, has to do with the ‘taken for granted nature of families’ (p. 6). Despite the emergence of an increasingly globally aware, reflexive modernity, in which the public's consciousness of domestic violence has definitely been raised, the overwhelming majority of people remain committed to the belief that ‘intimate adult partnerships’ are the ‘hub around which relationships evolve’ (p. 59). A deceptive ideology of ‘familism’ sustains ambivalent attitudes towards violence against women by reassuring us of our own normality and imbuing our images of normal family life with ‘ideas of sanctity, security, nurturing and intimacy’ (p. 15). In this context, unpleasant aspects of family life are rendered invisible precisely because

Whilst families take more forms than we often recognise, they also tend to embody a number of shared meanings and blindspots. Families can be both comforting ‘havens’ from the pressures of the outside world (what McKie calls ‘fusion’) and disturbing sources of terror and entrapment (what McKie calls ‘fission’) (ibid). For many people the ‘family home’, most typically where they grew up and the place where their parents still live, is a primary source of identification; a place where the second generation feels ‘at home’ even though they usually reside elsewhere, and a place where a sense fulfilment is or was achieved through the renegotiation of interpersonal relationships. Yet, family homes are also places where obligations of kinship are most readily exploited, where expectations are quietly imposed and uncomfortable ‘accommodations’ tolerated (p. 14). Such accommodations often take a gendered form, explaining why, McKie argues, women's entry into paid employment has not been matched by changes in men's domestic behaviours.

As McKie's comparative analysis of Finland, Sweden and Scotland exposes (ch. 4), even in countries where ‘women friendly’ policies are in evidence, women's ‘preservation work’ – work that is ‘necessary to meet the needs of others and maintain families’ (p. 62) – continues to be undervalued:

Our commitment to overtly romantic, implicitly nostalgic ideas about what (nuclear) family life should be like therefore help explain why it is that the privacy of the family is usually defended at considerable physical and psychological cost to family members, why the shame of failing one's children is typically felt more acutely by mothers than fathers, and why it is that men and women continue to invest in polarised ideas about each others’ roles and responsibilities despite ostensible commitments to equality. On these fronts – as well as in her deconstruction of the contexts through which neglect and abuse of the elderly occurs – McKie's contributions represent a valuable engagement with a field of study that has, as she alludes, sometimes proved rather too preoccupied with evaluating government policy to the detriment of critical sociological interrogation. McKie is certainly correct that work on domestic abuse needs to take account of the way in which the state cultivates masculinities that are defined by a willingness to enact violence in defence of the nation and its values, including family values. McKie is also right to draw attention to the problem of physical violence, psychological intimidation and sexual exploitation suffered by women and children in countries undergoing reconstruction. Nevertheless, I would have liked to have heard more about whether the causes of these many violations are the same in Afghanistan, the former Soviet Union, Northern Ireland and South Africa – to use the examples McKie cites – or whether some more than others are responses to the trauma of war, the challenges faced by post-conflict economies and/or democratizing states, or the semblances of previously unearthed patriarchal values.

Whilst I agree with McKie that there ‘is no single theory or discipline that explains why some individuals or groups are violent or abusive towards others, or why violence is more prevalent in certain communities than others’ (p. 141), I think social scientists have too often eschewed the task of trying to understand the behaviour of those who perpetrate abuses in spite of prohibiting social norms and expectations. If men and boys genuinely do have a ‘divided, tense, or oppositional relationship to hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell, 2002: 11, cited in McKie, 2005: 45) then is it not at least possible that some perpetrators actually feel shame rather than simply expressing it, instrumentally, to ‘distance’ themselves from ‘violent acts and relationships’ (p. 68)? Chapter 1 of Families, Violence and Social Change begins with the case of Robert Mochrie – a man with a ‘secret self’, who hid his financial ruin and mental health problems from family and friends, before killing his wife, four children, and then himself (pp. 11–12). In this case the agonizing disjunction between some men's social expectations and the psychological reality of their lives could not be more evident. Yet the Mochrie case remains untheorized in McKie's account. Maybe the interpretive challenge this case poses is too much to ask from a book that in many other respects exposes the study of violence within families to some much needed sociological exposition. But the question which McKie repeatedly poses, as to the extent to which violence towards women is an expression of men's power, or its opposite – an illegitimate backlash against women's individual and collective independence – will need to be answered empirically if a more politically and practically useful understanding of these difficult issues is to evolve.

It can be disquieting to read analyses of a social setting that you know well as a participant, and this is particularly so for ethnographic research, with its often intimate portrayals, which at their best provide an alternative perspective that even lifelong participants find enlightening but at their worst can seem arrogantly and excruciatingly wide of the mark. This is especially the case for sociological studies of religion, since one approaches them with the expectation that they will adopt a position of considerable cynicism regarding religious belief and the importance of religion in modern societies. That such general cynicism is a commonplace in the discipline and even affects those whose research interests lie in the area of religion is attested by Paul Chambers’ account of his own experiences, with job interview panels for example: ‘The general consensus seemed to be that secularization was a fact of life, mainstream religion was on its way out (and a good thing too) and were there not more important things to investigate …’ (p. 12). In the face of such inevitable disquiet from one quarter and dismissive attitudes from another, Chambers has succeeded in producing a balanced study of the processes of decline in Christian congregations in Wales over the past half century. His findings will be recognised as providing valid insights – if not any startling revelations – by most members and adherents of Welsh Christian congregations. And his volume also provides a valuable analysis of this decline, which recognises the social significance of religious institutions, uncovers the considerable variation within the overall picture of decline, and discusses the relationship between broader social changes and local circumstances in the production of varied outcomes in several different congregations. At the same time Chambers challenges grand theories that take secularization as a monolithic explanation for the decline of religious institutions in modern society.

After a discussion of the results of the author's own 1995 survey of churches and chapels in Swansea in south Wales, in which the general picture of statistical decline in membership and attendance is considered and variations within it noted, the volume focuses on four ethnographically based case studies of different congregations in the Swansea area. The four case studies are: ‘Zion’, an English Baptist church located in one of Swansea's historic industrial working-class communities on the ‘eastside’; ‘St John’, a parish church in the same eastside community; ‘Maestref’, an English Baptist church in the comparatively affluent suburbs to the west of the city; and ‘Westside Evangelical Church’, in the same suburban area. The first of these, which is actually a composite case study based primarily on ‘Zion’ but bringing in material from four other congregations in the eastside, paints a picture of terminal decline with average attendance below 20, ageing congregations, and a financial inability to retain ministerial leadership or maintain buildings. This classic portrayal of decline is linked to major social change in the post-World War II era such as the occupational (and geographical) mobility of young working-class people who had access to higher education for the first time. In contrast, ‘Maestref’ is comparatively buoyant in terms of membership and attendance; however, Chambers sees the seeds of decline over the next decade or two due to an internal culture that is controlled by a couple of groupings which organise specific social activities but show little interest in spiritual matters or in attracting new members.

The remaining two case studies are examples of comparative success and growth rather than decline, but for contrasting reasons. ‘St John’, following an unsuccessful venture into evangelicalism by a previous vicar, has managed to re-establish itself as a middle-of-the-road community church, based in the still dense kinship and friendship networks of this working-class area. Its position as a community church is greatly assisted by its position within a larger religious organisation that assumes its churches are there to serve the broader community, not just its own membership, and that can ensure it has the services of a professional leadership. The fourth case study, ‘Westside Evangelical Church’, is an example of what Chambers calls an associational rather than a communal model. It has an affluent middle-class congregation, has experienced significant steady growth and has adopted a policy of planting new congregations rather than accepting continual growth. Chambers argues that its growth ‘is based upon its relatively moderate evangelical stance and its hands-off approach to social control’ (p. 197). Clearly this finding casts doubt on the common assumption that the strongly evangelical sects are the primary site of any Christian religious growth in modern societies, and these two ‘success stories’ underline the variability within the well-known statistical indicators of decline.

There are two areas where this volume disappoints to some extent. First, there is a somewhat facile assumption that the decline of the Welsh language in Swansea is an important factor in the decline of a significant proportion of the Nonconformist congregations. Certainly, in the second half of the twentieth century, both the chapels and the Welsh language were affected by social change, in particular residential mobility and lack of language-based planning in the creation of large new housing estates, which equally undermined Welsh as a community language and the chapels as community institutions. However, the Welsh language has shown great vitality in the education sector, especially with the growth of Welsh-medium schools, which has led to significant increases in the proportion of Welsh speakers in younger age groups. However, with few exceptions, this new source of Welsh speakers, drawn from a rather different population base to that which supported the Welsh Nonconformist chapels, has not proven to be a fruitful area for recruitment of new church members. A second point that deserved some attention in an ethnographically based study is a more reflexive discussion of the author's own position regarding religious observance and commitment.

Nevertheless this is a very good study that provides new insights into processes of religious decline. It is particularly praiseworthy for its attention to local circumstances, their links with broader societal change, and the significant, and informative, variability that these produce.

This book contributes to a growing number of studies on life in the Chinese countryside, which examine how larger political and economic changes are reflected in the personal stories, attitudes and desires of ordinary villagers. Radical politics in the People's Republic of China always aimed at transforming a ‘traditional culture’ typically associated with rural China. These used different vehicles: studies on the Maoist era and early Reform period thus typically focused on the effects of central politics on ‘public life’ in the village, while with the increasing ‘de-politization’ the interest shifted to transformations of the ‘private sphere’ brought about by the new market economy and the ‘opening up’ of the country. The effects of individualization on a society which traditionally emphasized familism and collectivism has become a frequent topic. Also here, the emphasis is on recounting individual life stories and on capturing the villagers’ views on changes and upheavals that ‘descended’ on them, engulfed them, and often changed their relationships and attitudes dramatically. Such ‘villagers studies’ (as different from the classic ‘village study’) have become a veritable genre in Chinese studies. The book reviewed here fits squarely into this genre; demonstrating its strengths but also exemplifying its possible problems. Let me start with the strengths.

The main body of the book was originally published in Chinese during the late 1990s; for the publication with M. E. Sharpe the authors added a chapter on ‘methodology’ and a chapter on ‘recent changes’. The authors – three applied social scientists from Hong Kong Polytechnic University – did their research in Baixiu Village, an industrialized village in Guangdong Province, where they established a ‘research office’. After the reforms, Guangdong Province quickly became the receiver of a very high amount of foreign investments; here, where local people speak Cantonese as those in nearby Hong Kong, and often have relatives in Hong Kong, the social effects of economic reforms have been particularly drastic and profound. The book explores these effects in areas related to Chinese ‘familism’, which then form its three main parts: ‘Finding a Partner, Love and Marriage’; ‘Tradition, Women and the Interpretation of the Self’; and ‘Sex and the Sex Trade under the Reform and Opening-Up Policy’. The authors’ strategy is to concentrate on certain key informants, and to meticulously recount their attitudes, desires, and views on recent changes, their explanations for the choices made and their hopes for the future. With regard to villagers’ attitudes towards marriage, partnership, self-realization and sex the authors identify three generations: villagers who grew up before the Chinese Revolution, those who married during the Cultural Revolution, and those who became adults after the reforms. In the first generation, ‘traditional familism’ is intact and the self concept is defined by the ‘larger-self’ – the ‘larger groups formed by relatives and lineage members’ (p. 8). In the second generation, this ‘larger self’ is weakened by revolutionary politics, but the husband-wife relation remains largely defined by traditional familism. Only in the third generation, the self-concept reaches a certain degree of autonomy, however, the crumbling of the ‘larger self’ also results in ‘extremely instrumental values’, a ‘commodification of women’ and a ‘severely distorted society’ (esp. chapter 13). The authors make a point of capturing both male and female views, and succeed in showing how ‘modernization’ can be an uneven, contradictory, and often painful experience. The statements of key informants are supplemented with interviews with their friends and relatives, and in the third part the authors focus on the attitudes and practices of two other relevant groups: ‘the teachers’ in Baixiu and the ‘sing-along girls’ (i.e., local prostitutes). The many direct quotes, the personal stories, and the documentation of feelings, desires, and emotions of ‘ordinary villagers’ allows especially the Western reader unique insights into how rural people experience the momentous changes in China's recent history. This makes this book in many ways a fascinating and important document of grassroots China.

But the book's empirical strengths are overshadowed by its theoretical flaws. These essentially boil down to a simplistic theoretical approach, a surprisingly superficial grasp on rural realities (despite what has been said before), and the underlying assumption that the People's Republic is nothing but a more traditional China. The theoretical argument proceeds on the basis of such tired oppositions as collectivism / individualism, tradition / modernity, spiritualism / materialism, and China and ‘the West’. The authors thus argue that in ‘traditional’ China, individual feelings, interest and desires played little role in shaping personal agency; rather, the ‘needs of the self’ (p. 133) were dominated by what the authors call the ‘value of the ultimate concern’ (p. 4): the family, its reproductive interests, and its ‘Confucian’ ethics. The new market economy, in contrast, is the harbinger of an individualism totally at odds with tradition; it brings ‘instrumental values’, materialism, the pursuit of wealth, and egocentric desires associated with the ‘West’ and ‘modernization’. The authors thus define the Reform period as ‘a change from tradition to modernization’ (p. 93). They note as positive effects of this transition a stronger emphasis on the husband-wife relationship, a greater economic independence of women, and a more autonomous self, but decry as its flip-side the development of an ‘extremely distorted society’, characterized by generational conflicts, an obsession with sex, and the relentless pursuit of wealth. In a narrative characterized by the grand oppositions mentioned above, we find neither a hint at the endemic conflicts between brothers and brothers, or between women in ‘traditional’ Chinese families, nor at the prevalence of prostitution, or the ‘market in women’ in late imperial China. There is no discussion of the ‘rugged individual’ that, according to Margery Wolf, characterized women in ‘traditional’ Chinese families. Moreover, the influences of the present Chinese state on molding individual behavior are ignored, as is the ‘collectivism’ inherent in the ‘obsession with sex’ and the ‘pursuit of wealth’. Even the data presented should have suggested such a nuanced discussion: ‘Uncle Qiu’, who exemplifies the familial orientation of traditional China, is married to a woman (of the same generation, one has to assume) who has left him to live in Hong Kong; one of the local teachers despises prostitution but feels compelled to publicly behave ‘as if’ he would see ‘sing-along-girls’; and Ah Zhen, the young woman who values her education, income and freedom, probably shows her ‘filial piety’ through financially supporting her parents. The rigid opposition between a traditional, selfless familism and modern, egocentric, individualism does not allow the authors to see how little apparently ‘modern’ patterns of behavior might actually have to do with personal autonomy. I do not want to deny the important social and cultural changes that are happening in contemporary China, but to approach mainland China simply as a case of late ‘modernization’ produces gross simplifications and distortions. The authors claim that their approach is culture – and context – sensitive. But playing up the opposition ‘China versus the West’ not only produces the stereotype ‘traditional China’, it also obscures the here relevant cultural difference between Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China.