- Email: [email protected]
Families in multicultural perspective
Book Reviews
1747
contraceptive development, but elsewhere in the volume it is noted Family Health International has been working on a plastic condom for almost a decade. It is not a technically daunting project to fabricate a plastic envelope to embrace the male organ of copulation: is it poor management, lack of inventiveness, or an inappropriate choice of regulatory authority to which to submit such a device that is at fault? If contraceptive research and development is important-and the writers obviously believe it is--then the reader deserves a more thoughtful analysis. The group whose input researchers need most directly is that of the consumers of family planning. The book attempts to fill this void by including some vocal women's advocates. The attempt largely fails, not because of lack of intelligence but because some of the writers, instead of responding to the subtleties of human behavior and the complexities of reproductive physiology, allow strongly held beliefs to color their interpretation of data. One of the assertions of feminists is that modern female methods of contraception have been developed by a patriarchal scientific community, insensitive to women's needs. Scientific insights are independent of gender, race and religion. There are nice and nasty scientists, male and female, Christian, Islamic and atheist, but unless they falsify data they all belong to the same open, honest system of scientific medicine, based on testable observations made within a framework of evolutionary biology. The hypotheses and experiments of science and the incontestable assertions of fundamentalist thinking are oil and water and do not mix--sadly, some contemporary feminist writers come dangerously close to certain aspects of fundamentalist thinking. Biologically female cycles of fertility are naturally interrupted by pregnancy and lactation, which systemic contraceptive methods exploit, while there is no comparable
natural foundation on which to build a 'male pill'. It is also biologically plausible that the sex making the most investment in reproduction--which in mammals is always the female--will also be the sex most likely to be interested in fertility control. Politically correct, but physiologically contrived assertions, about systemically active methods of controlling male fertility risk diverting scarce resources from more urgent and achievable goals. The reader gets the impression that Feminism, like other '-isms', demands allegiance and is intolerant of other perspectives while being overly sensitive to criticism itself. It uses derogatory language about other viewpoints in family planning. Germain and Marcello, in particular, set up an unnecessary and largely false dichotomy between family planning and women's health. The special relationship between contraceptive development and feminists contained in the assertion they "must be included in decision making and advisory bodies at all stages of the research process" should not be accepted uncritically. In India, feminists are responsible for denying women access to injectable contraceptives. A strategy more likely to help women would be to focus on increasingly safe access to abortion and to develop an effective virucide women could use to prevent pregnancy and HIV. To a considerable extent contraceptive development has been driven on to barren rocks by committee management and the winds of political correctness.
Families in Multicultural Perspective, edited by Bron B.
myself creating potential classroom projects to augment the chapter. Finally, Section V provided the context I expected of the book when I first opened the cover--two in-depth chapters on families in specific cultures. Norma Burgess' chapter on the African American family is refreshing in that it is not simply another diatribe about the evils of slavery and the breakup of the African American family on the auction block. Rather, it provides a balanced historical overview that considers first the African family and then the African American family through the Civil Rights era. The chapter looks forward, as well, and gives us a hint of how the African American family will continue to evolve in the future. Bron Ingnldsby provides a look into the Latin American family, a broad topic, to say the least. Finding common threads of familism and machismo across Latin American cultures, the overview is quite well-done. The most interesting part of the chapter is Ingoldsby's thoughtful discussion of why the problem of street children in Latin America is so widespread. Finally, this text provides a bank of exercises for the student, guidelines for the instructor, and an appendix for selected international comparisons. The exercises provide a starting point for classroom discussions, but they do not comprise sufficient material for an entire course. Mixing the instructor guidelines into a section with the student exercises is also somewhat disconcerting. The editors might consider expanding the exercises and providing a separate insert for instructors in future editions. Ingoldsby and Smith have succeeded in providing an edited text for undergraduates that comprises materials from an introductory course in cultural anthropology and proceeds to a contemporary study of the family. Instructors
Ingoldsby and Suzanna Smith. Guilford Publications, New York, N.Y., 1995, 432 pp., U.S.$45.00 (hardback). Cultural diversity and multiculturalism are more than buzzwords in politically-correct venues, they are constructs that good educators integrate into classroom materials so that students are forced to go beyond the limits of ethnocentric thinking. Such educational efforts are now more important than ever as the world faces increased migration, faster travel, instant communications and an interdependent global economy. Ingoldsby and Smith have compiled a new text that allows instructors to lead discussions on differences between cultures using the family as the primary unit of comparison. My first impression was that the authors had put together a typical cultural anthropology text, similar to one I had used more than 20 years ago. Indeed, the first three sections (half the book) contained almost parallel material-definitions of family, patterns of kinship and residence, marital relationships and the socialization of children. The examples were even the same, including the Iroquois and Trobriand Islanders. Where, I asked myself, was the contemporary perspective that would sell this material to bored undergraduates? Then I hit Section IV on Gender and Family Relations and the book came alive. Here was the opportunity to discuss the empowerment of women, to introduce how using different paradigms to examine the balance of power in the family yields different conclusions, to challenge how we look at family violence. In fact, the discussion of marital power by Jack and Judith Balswick was so well done that I found
Department of Maternal and Child Health School of Public Health University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 U.S.A.
Malcolm Pots
1748
Book Reviews
in anthropology, sociology and social work should examine this text for use in their courses. This text is not sufficient, however, for a graduate course or a course designed for students going into the professions. Such a text, with more chapters like the ones on the African American family and the Latin American family, is sorely needed to train professionals who work in societies that are rapidly becoming more culturally diverse. I hope this team decides to put one
together in the near future as their track record with this text is clearly solid.
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1992. First paperback edition 1993, 614 pp., U.S. $15 (paperback).
is written with continuous words and phrases in Portuguese, in an intent to keep the original sense and to furnish a link for translation, not only of words but of the whole cultural context in which it evolves. Normally the author translates a word or phrase, repeating it in English, which avoids interruptions in reading for those who do not understand Portuguese. Additionally, for the reader's assistance, she adds a very good glossary at the end of the book (pp. 557 565), which aids understanding whenever words are not followed by translation. The book's layout goes from most general to most detailed, from the inherited past to doubts and questions about the future, from history to politics. It has 12 chapters, a prologue, a long introduction and an epilogue, all of them with notably suggestive titles and subtitles: Tropical Sadness, Our Lady of Sorrows, and so on. Full of scientific, literary and philosophical quotes, or simply of village wall graffiti. The book starts by placing the reader in the Brazilian northeast--in the 600,000 square miles of suffering which constitute the sugar cane production land. 'Sweetness and death', is this chapter's subtitle, which refers to the misery that mono-cultivation has brought to this zone. The chapter gives a historic description of sugar cane production as well as of modern factories and of women's role in this job. From the region it proceeds to describe the city of Born Jesfis. Subtitled, 'One hundred years without water', this chapter relates the beginning of a settlement in a slave cotton and sugar plantation and how the plantation's owner's widow--after he was killed in a r e v o l t ~ o n a t e d the land for the municipality's growth. The city also had textile and shoe industries, which declined and gave place to shantytowns on the urban borders. This chapter describes the social structure and offers an interesting differentiation made by Born Jesfis's inhabitants between three types of poor. Chapter 3 is called 'Reciprocity and dependency: The double ethic of Born Jesfis', which refers to the dual behaviour of those individuals studied: one behaviour towards those they consider their equal and another towards those they consider superior; bosses and benefactors. One ethic is based on reciprocity, the other on patronage and dependency. The first case describes solidarity and collective ways of work; the second explains classifcations made between good and bad bosses. It concludes with a reflection on addiction to dependency: "Domination is itself a form of dependency, and dependency is like nothing more than a drug or an addiction." (p. 126). Chapter 4 starts with the story of a woman who had murdered both her little children. When asked by the author: "Why did you do it?", the answer was brutal: "To stop them from crying for milk." While trying to get an explanation, the inhabitants of the village themselves gave her an answer which gives a title to the chapter: Delirio de Fome 'The madness of hunger'. In subsequent pages the taboo against hunger is discussed, together with other collective experiences of hunger in African indigenous villages, in Nazi concentration camps and how Brazilian
"Ethnographic fieldwork and writing take long time" (p. 534), says Nancy Scheper-Hughes at the end o f her thick book on everyday life, women, disease and death in a city in the Brazilian northeast. And this is particularly true in her case since she relates her personal experiences in a community for over a quarter of a century. Her first contacts originated when, at the age of 20, she arrived in the community to work as a Peace Corps public health and community development worker between 1964 and 1966. After a 16-year absence she returned in 1982, but this time as an anthropologist and her contacts were extended to successive visits until the last field work reported in her book, carried out in 1989. To say that the book is about anthropology of child mortality in an urban community is far too restrictive. It is a moving book in which life's, love's and death's essential problems are tackled and discussed. It is--in the most correct ethnographic tradition--a book that describes in every detail the atmosphere of the place and its people's everyday routine; it relates the story of their lives and it talks about the dreams and frustrations of the inhabitants of a shantytown called Alto Cruzeiro in a city nicknamed Born Jesfis da Mata. But it is far more than that: it is a book on Brazil as a society, about Latin America and about the poor in the world. It is a book committed to the knowledge and the destiny of those many women and men struggling to survive in this world. "Don't pity the infants who died here..." says one o f the interviewees, "Pity us instead. Weep for their mothers who are condemned to live" (p. 403). We often speak of the importance of health, not about illness; however, as a rule one ends up working in a restricted perspective of the disease and of the medical point of view. But Scheper-Hughes's book introduces us to the multiplicity of material and cultural conditioning agents affecting the health of children and adults who live in poverty and also to the limitations of health workers: At times due to a moral indifference, "The Doctor had no values" (p. 209); at others due to institutional incapacity, "What can we do? The health post can't prescribe food" (p. 154). The author explicitly assumes a feminine perspective since she studies women and explores ways of viewing feminine society and a "womanly anthropology" (p. 21). However, the tone is not dogmatic nor does it become unpleasant for those of us who are not women. On the contrary, she introduces the richness of a different outlook understood to be focused on the woman. The style o f the book is narrative. Moving along between the first and the third persons the author relates just as naturally a scene on a village street or a discussion during a dinner at a North American university. Analysis is reached without much meditation and with equal spontaneity Jean Paul Sartre or a popular Brazilian song is cited. The book
Department of Urban Studies and Community Health Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ 08903 U.S.A.
Dona Schneider
1747
contraceptive development, but elsewhere in the volume it is noted Family Health International has been working on a plastic condom for almost a decade. It is not a technically daunting project to fabricate a plastic envelope to embrace the male organ of copulation: is it poor management, lack of inventiveness, or an inappropriate choice of regulatory authority to which to submit such a device that is at fault? If contraceptive research and development is important-and the writers obviously believe it is--then the reader deserves a more thoughtful analysis. The group whose input researchers need most directly is that of the consumers of family planning. The book attempts to fill this void by including some vocal women's advocates. The attempt largely fails, not because of lack of intelligence but because some of the writers, instead of responding to the subtleties of human behavior and the complexities of reproductive physiology, allow strongly held beliefs to color their interpretation of data. One of the assertions of feminists is that modern female methods of contraception have been developed by a patriarchal scientific community, insensitive to women's needs. Scientific insights are independent of gender, race and religion. There are nice and nasty scientists, male and female, Christian, Islamic and atheist, but unless they falsify data they all belong to the same open, honest system of scientific medicine, based on testable observations made within a framework of evolutionary biology. The hypotheses and experiments of science and the incontestable assertions of fundamentalist thinking are oil and water and do not mix--sadly, some contemporary feminist writers come dangerously close to certain aspects of fundamentalist thinking. Biologically female cycles of fertility are naturally interrupted by pregnancy and lactation, which systemic contraceptive methods exploit, while there is no comparable
natural foundation on which to build a 'male pill'. It is also biologically plausible that the sex making the most investment in reproduction--which in mammals is always the female--will also be the sex most likely to be interested in fertility control. Politically correct, but physiologically contrived assertions, about systemically active methods of controlling male fertility risk diverting scarce resources from more urgent and achievable goals. The reader gets the impression that Feminism, like other '-isms', demands allegiance and is intolerant of other perspectives while being overly sensitive to criticism itself. It uses derogatory language about other viewpoints in family planning. Germain and Marcello, in particular, set up an unnecessary and largely false dichotomy between family planning and women's health. The special relationship between contraceptive development and feminists contained in the assertion they "must be included in decision making and advisory bodies at all stages of the research process" should not be accepted uncritically. In India, feminists are responsible for denying women access to injectable contraceptives. A strategy more likely to help women would be to focus on increasingly safe access to abortion and to develop an effective virucide women could use to prevent pregnancy and HIV. To a considerable extent contraceptive development has been driven on to barren rocks by committee management and the winds of political correctness.
Families in Multicultural Perspective, edited by Bron B.
myself creating potential classroom projects to augment the chapter. Finally, Section V provided the context I expected of the book when I first opened the cover--two in-depth chapters on families in specific cultures. Norma Burgess' chapter on the African American family is refreshing in that it is not simply another diatribe about the evils of slavery and the breakup of the African American family on the auction block. Rather, it provides a balanced historical overview that considers first the African family and then the African American family through the Civil Rights era. The chapter looks forward, as well, and gives us a hint of how the African American family will continue to evolve in the future. Bron Ingnldsby provides a look into the Latin American family, a broad topic, to say the least. Finding common threads of familism and machismo across Latin American cultures, the overview is quite well-done. The most interesting part of the chapter is Ingoldsby's thoughtful discussion of why the problem of street children in Latin America is so widespread. Finally, this text provides a bank of exercises for the student, guidelines for the instructor, and an appendix for selected international comparisons. The exercises provide a starting point for classroom discussions, but they do not comprise sufficient material for an entire course. Mixing the instructor guidelines into a section with the student exercises is also somewhat disconcerting. The editors might consider expanding the exercises and providing a separate insert for instructors in future editions. Ingoldsby and Smith have succeeded in providing an edited text for undergraduates that comprises materials from an introductory course in cultural anthropology and proceeds to a contemporary study of the family. Instructors
Ingoldsby and Suzanna Smith. Guilford Publications, New York, N.Y., 1995, 432 pp., U.S.$45.00 (hardback). Cultural diversity and multiculturalism are more than buzzwords in politically-correct venues, they are constructs that good educators integrate into classroom materials so that students are forced to go beyond the limits of ethnocentric thinking. Such educational efforts are now more important than ever as the world faces increased migration, faster travel, instant communications and an interdependent global economy. Ingoldsby and Smith have compiled a new text that allows instructors to lead discussions on differences between cultures using the family as the primary unit of comparison. My first impression was that the authors had put together a typical cultural anthropology text, similar to one I had used more than 20 years ago. Indeed, the first three sections (half the book) contained almost parallel material-definitions of family, patterns of kinship and residence, marital relationships and the socialization of children. The examples were even the same, including the Iroquois and Trobriand Islanders. Where, I asked myself, was the contemporary perspective that would sell this material to bored undergraduates? Then I hit Section IV on Gender and Family Relations and the book came alive. Here was the opportunity to discuss the empowerment of women, to introduce how using different paradigms to examine the balance of power in the family yields different conclusions, to challenge how we look at family violence. In fact, the discussion of marital power by Jack and Judith Balswick was so well done that I found
Department of Maternal and Child Health School of Public Health University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 U.S.A.
Malcolm Pots
1748
Book Reviews
in anthropology, sociology and social work should examine this text for use in their courses. This text is not sufficient, however, for a graduate course or a course designed for students going into the professions. Such a text, with more chapters like the ones on the African American family and the Latin American family, is sorely needed to train professionals who work in societies that are rapidly becoming more culturally diverse. I hope this team decides to put one
together in the near future as their track record with this text is clearly solid.
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1992. First paperback edition 1993, 614 pp., U.S. $15 (paperback).
is written with continuous words and phrases in Portuguese, in an intent to keep the original sense and to furnish a link for translation, not only of words but of the whole cultural context in which it evolves. Normally the author translates a word or phrase, repeating it in English, which avoids interruptions in reading for those who do not understand Portuguese. Additionally, for the reader's assistance, she adds a very good glossary at the end of the book (pp. 557 565), which aids understanding whenever words are not followed by translation. The book's layout goes from most general to most detailed, from the inherited past to doubts and questions about the future, from history to politics. It has 12 chapters, a prologue, a long introduction and an epilogue, all of them with notably suggestive titles and subtitles: Tropical Sadness, Our Lady of Sorrows, and so on. Full of scientific, literary and philosophical quotes, or simply of village wall graffiti. The book starts by placing the reader in the Brazilian northeast--in the 600,000 square miles of suffering which constitute the sugar cane production land. 'Sweetness and death', is this chapter's subtitle, which refers to the misery that mono-cultivation has brought to this zone. The chapter gives a historic description of sugar cane production as well as of modern factories and of women's role in this job. From the region it proceeds to describe the city of Born Jesfis. Subtitled, 'One hundred years without water', this chapter relates the beginning of a settlement in a slave cotton and sugar plantation and how the plantation's owner's widow--after he was killed in a r e v o l t ~ o n a t e d the land for the municipality's growth. The city also had textile and shoe industries, which declined and gave place to shantytowns on the urban borders. This chapter describes the social structure and offers an interesting differentiation made by Born Jesfis's inhabitants between three types of poor. Chapter 3 is called 'Reciprocity and dependency: The double ethic of Born Jesfis', which refers to the dual behaviour of those individuals studied: one behaviour towards those they consider their equal and another towards those they consider superior; bosses and benefactors. One ethic is based on reciprocity, the other on patronage and dependency. The first case describes solidarity and collective ways of work; the second explains classifcations made between good and bad bosses. It concludes with a reflection on addiction to dependency: "Domination is itself a form of dependency, and dependency is like nothing more than a drug or an addiction." (p. 126). Chapter 4 starts with the story of a woman who had murdered both her little children. When asked by the author: "Why did you do it?", the answer was brutal: "To stop them from crying for milk." While trying to get an explanation, the inhabitants of the village themselves gave her an answer which gives a title to the chapter: Delirio de Fome 'The madness of hunger'. In subsequent pages the taboo against hunger is discussed, together with other collective experiences of hunger in African indigenous villages, in Nazi concentration camps and how Brazilian
"Ethnographic fieldwork and writing take long time" (p. 534), says Nancy Scheper-Hughes at the end o f her thick book on everyday life, women, disease and death in a city in the Brazilian northeast. And this is particularly true in her case since she relates her personal experiences in a community for over a quarter of a century. Her first contacts originated when, at the age of 20, she arrived in the community to work as a Peace Corps public health and community development worker between 1964 and 1966. After a 16-year absence she returned in 1982, but this time as an anthropologist and her contacts were extended to successive visits until the last field work reported in her book, carried out in 1989. To say that the book is about anthropology of child mortality in an urban community is far too restrictive. It is a moving book in which life's, love's and death's essential problems are tackled and discussed. It is--in the most correct ethnographic tradition--a book that describes in every detail the atmosphere of the place and its people's everyday routine; it relates the story of their lives and it talks about the dreams and frustrations of the inhabitants of a shantytown called Alto Cruzeiro in a city nicknamed Born Jesfis da Mata. But it is far more than that: it is a book on Brazil as a society, about Latin America and about the poor in the world. It is a book committed to the knowledge and the destiny of those many women and men struggling to survive in this world. "Don't pity the infants who died here..." says one o f the interviewees, "Pity us instead. Weep for their mothers who are condemned to live" (p. 403). We often speak of the importance of health, not about illness; however, as a rule one ends up working in a restricted perspective of the disease and of the medical point of view. But Scheper-Hughes's book introduces us to the multiplicity of material and cultural conditioning agents affecting the health of children and adults who live in poverty and also to the limitations of health workers: At times due to a moral indifference, "The Doctor had no values" (p. 209); at others due to institutional incapacity, "What can we do? The health post can't prescribe food" (p. 154). The author explicitly assumes a feminine perspective since she studies women and explores ways of viewing feminine society and a "womanly anthropology" (p. 21). However, the tone is not dogmatic nor does it become unpleasant for those of us who are not women. On the contrary, she introduces the richness of a different outlook understood to be focused on the woman. The style o f the book is narrative. Moving along between the first and the third persons the author relates just as naturally a scene on a village street or a discussion during a dinner at a North American university. Analysis is reached without much meditation and with equal spontaneity Jean Paul Sartre or a popular Brazilian song is cited. The book
Department of Urban Studies and Community Health Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ 08903 U.S.A.
Dona Schneider