and introduces the anthropological taste for .... Yes, law has often been the handmaiden of power and has ... mise the unjust; colonial dispossession of land has ...
Book Reviews
512
different chapters, which can be read independently. Rather than providing a standard definition of development, the book starts by offering various meanings of development, and introduces the anthropological taste for differences in meanings and interpretations of development. Chapter 2 offers an illustrative discussion on varieties of anthropological engagements in development. Chapter 3 discusses the institutional architecture of aid and development, which shows that the world of international development involves an assemblage of institutions of different nature and forms. The next four chapters discuss the social construction of poor and poverty, the paradox of human rights and culture, politics of knowledge, and neo-liberalism and inequality. The last two chapters conclude with a discussion on the disjuncture between policy and practice, and offer a framework for constructive engagement with development. Throughout the book the use of personal experience, examples and questions helps illustrate the discussion. One of the key merits of the book is that it condenses several decades of research into an accessible, well-referenced and wellillustrated textbook that provides provoking insights into the anthropology and development. The chapters are short, concise and make an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses. The book opens up many questions, but does not provide solutions or a step-by-step guide on how to ‘do development’. The aim of the book is not to produce consensus on international development or to get into a polarising ideological debate on international development, for which there are many other books. It offers a less essentialising view of development. One could imagine that the instructors using this book will expect their students to write their essays beyond the ideological debate on aid and development. Likewise, one would hope
that the practitioners of development would take time out from their log-frames to think critically and reflect on their assumptions, approaches and politics. Anthropologists are good in providing fine analysis. Those who work in life-saving and protection missions have to act swiftly when they are tasked with achieving more with fewer resources. Given that evidence-based movement appears to be dominant in the field of international development, anthropological accounts will have to find a space to engage with this new social form.
Reference Justice, J. (1989), Policies, Plans and People: Foreign Aid and Health Development, Berkeley, University of California Press. jeevan raj sharma University of Edinburgh Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Cambridge, Polity, 2013, 240 pp., £14.99 (p/b), ISBN 978-0-74565-381-5, £45.00 (h/b), ISBN 978-0-74565-380-8. Dispossession is not your conventional scholarly book; it does not present an argument so much as it presents a dialogue in search of one, and we are invited into the tentative, provisional steps toward it. As readers, we feel an intimate oral presence of the authors, as we meander through erudite fragments of argument. The book seeks to address dispossession and engages with its existential and social dimension. Dispossession is global. People lose property and land, lose citizenship and voice, and by means of such dispossession they lose a secure belonging in the world. This is a truly significant problem, and
Book Reviews
Butler and Athanasiou bring together the wide scope of the dynamics when they link the personal, the material, the social and the institutional dimensions. The authors are concerned with the alienating dynamics of capitalism and, especially, with how the idea of unitary subjects effaces ‘difference’ and imposes the violence of homogenisation. The 21 chapters each deal with an aspect of dispossession, ranging from sexual dispossession, and relationality as dispossession, overdispossession of language to dispossession of rights of citizenship and property. A fundamental discomfort with liberalism is especially clear in their treatment of ‘possession’. While the dispossessed have the authors’ sympathy and solidarity, it is unclear whether the empathy is actually directed at the people or rather to their status as dispossessed. What happens to solidarity if or when these people actually manage to re-possess valuable property or status? Will it dissipate? Or, indeed, were they worthy of sympathy before they were dispossessed, when they actually did possess – individually or not – land, dignity or other resources? It is hard to tell whether the authors’ sympathy lies with the dispossessed and their dreams that, indeed, may be ‘a field of one’s own’, or whether it lies with the fetish of dispossession, as it represents the negation of possession. The absence of reference to how the people they speak about experience the dynamics they discuss would suggest the latter. Butler and Athanasiou discuss ways in which the dispossessed can address their plight without imbibing the ethos of possessive individualism. This ontology sees the individual as the owner of his or her personhood and goods, and it lays down epistemological tracks: on the one hand, it suggests an individualistic utilitarian ethos, yet on the other, it also works from the integrity of the individual. The authors find themselves in
513
modernity’s classical conundrum: individualism has alienating as well as emancipatory qualities. Butler and Athanasiou discuss the perils of combating dispossession with forms of enfranchisement that carry with them the seeds of individualism. Yet, dismissing the individual would seem to be worse, and recourse to the law to protect personhood, is, after all, legitimate to the authors. The discussion does not clarify the conundrum, let alone resolve it. While Butler and Athanasiou hint at different utopias and impossibilities, they remain rather vague and seem not to pay much attention to what different groups of dispossessed may themselves express. Utopias need not be populist, but unarticulated elitist utopias can be difficult to sell. Butler and Athanasiou drive a serious critique of power’s ruthless dispossession of people. However, at times, it is at the cost of productive nuance. Let me give an example: In sections about land dispossessions, Butler states (and Athanasiou agrees) that ‘[i]n fact, the distinction between legal and illegal land confiscation is finally not a very important one, since the legal means are as unjust and illegitimate as the illegal ones’ (25). Yes, law has often been the handmaiden of power and has been instrumental in plunder; ‘rule of law’ has historically been a claim to legitimise the unjust; colonial dispossession of land has been accompanied by a dispossession of political and legal power; and we should definitely not equate ‘legal’ with ‘just’. Yet, if legal and illegal are the same, why does ‘power’ even bother to use law? My guess is that it is because legal and illegal are not the same. Most lives are not simply ‘bare life’. The powerful may control political institutions and the means of force, and they may write the laws and control legal institutions, but they rarely make up a monolith exercising a fully accomplished hegemony. Moreover, most acts of politics and justice are accom-
Book Reviews
514
panied by public justifications. They may be contrived, hypocritical and false, and often are. Yet, policy or legal rulings are, by their public nature, sometimes also available to the people they dispossess, and they can become means of reclaiming possessions. Not in an equal way, not in a fair way, not in an easy or sustained way. But law and politics are not simply the preserve of the powerful, and to write off legal and illegal as the same thing is to forfeit the analytical opportunity to investigate legalisation and illegalisation as a central terrain of contention. This dynamic is too complex, too layered, and ultimately holds too much emancipatory potential to be dismissed. The true quality of the book is its exploratory and Socratic character. The issue at stake is fundamental, and we are in the foundry of arguments where the reader is compelled to form an opinion. For that, the book is a stimulating text. christian lund University of Copenhagen Migration, Health and Inequality, ed. Felicity Thomas and Jasmine Gideon, London, Zed Books, 2013, 272pp., £19.99 (p/b), ISBN 978-1-780-32124-0, £75.00 (h/b), ISBN 978-1-780-32125-7 Migration has become a major global policy issue in the early part of this century. In addition, it has become a deeply political issue in many countries, particularly as neo-liberal governments make it increasingly clear that in-migrants are unwelcome. Overtly or covertly, they are painted as a drain on resources, or as groups that fail to adapt sufficiently fast or competently to the customs, practices and beliefs in their new host country. They ‘flood’ in and ‘swamp’ the host country; indeed, such metaphors cast the ‘migrant’ in a very unfavourable light
– unless of course their country of origin is regarded as unproblematic, and culturally, economically and politically ‘closer’ to the host. In this edited volume particular attention is given to the health, well-being and entitlements of migrant populations, though the focus is entirely on those moving across international borders. Attention is given to the barriers that limit migrants’ access to healthcare, to the unfavourable working and living conditions they experience (and which, of course, have profound impacts on health), and to the vulnerability of migrants, particularly women. Consideration is also given to the impact on those left behind – family members and friends who may suffer adverse consequences from the move in which they are not directly involved. This topic calls for a multidisciplinary approach to bring together those working in public health, development studies, politics, geography and law, and the book succeeds in showing how different perspectives can illuminate the subject. The book is very well edited, with chapters organised around four themes: current migration patterns and processes; global policymaking and implementation; vulnerable groups; and transnationalism and diaspora. This structure, and the careful signposting by the editors in their introduction, lets the book stand out from those edited collections that appear to have little coherence. Mary HaourKnipe’s introductory chapter sets the scene wonderfully well, highlighting the complexity of modern migratory processes, drawing attention to the structural factors that impact on health and shape resulting inequalities. Sally Hargreaves and Jon Friedland examine the impact of international migration on access to, and use of, health services by those moving to Europe from resource-poor countries. They draw attention to infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis
