Review by Choice Review
Writing up one's lectures and producing a coherent monograph is an honorable but nowadays rarely invoked tradition. Gledhill has done just that: taken what must have been an excellent course in political anthropology and made it available to those who are not students at the University of London. In this monograph he covers the spectrum from what was right and wrong (mostly wrong) with European and North American colonial anthropology to the development and political action of ethnic and "subaltern" groups embedded in contemporary nation states. His presentation is critical on two levels: first in the authors and works he selects as worthy of discussion; second in the deconstruction and evaluation of those works. His ironic analysis of the "industry" devoted to "understanding" and then rooting out the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement in Peru is particularly illuminating. Although the works he selects for presentation and analysis are all in English, coverage is worldwide, critical, and cogent. If the editors of the Annual Review of Anthropology had requested a chapter on political anthropology and given the author 250 instead of 25 printed pages, this book would have satisfied their commission. Upper-division undergraduate and up. C. S. Peebles; Indiana University-Bloomington
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
