Culture and class in anthropology and history : a Newfoundland illustration /

More than simply another maritime community ethnography, this book is also a theoretically substantive and indeed provocative re-examination of three fundamental social-scientific concepts: culture, class, and process. Sider (City University of New York) attempts to reformulate the ahistorical concept of culture so that it ``intersects'' with a more dynamic Marxist concept of class. Within the historical context of Newfoundland, the author searches ``in the grip of merchant capital,'' for ``the underlying logic of ... social and cultural history.'' In the book's evocative ethnographic midsection, he shows how social institutions and historical processes were generated in Newfoundland, and how they affected the traditional community while at the same time linking that group to the political and economic powers that came to dominate it. A valuable complement to broadly similar anthropological studies of fishing communities,such as James C. Faris's Cat Harbour (1972), Judith Ennew's The Western Isles Today (CH, Oct '80), and Lawrence J. Taylor's Dutchmen on the Bay (CH, Mar '84). Sider's book also raises timely anthropological questions. For the earnest anthropologist or social historian.-G. Gwynne, SUNY at Stony Brook