Book Reviews 289 no similar Hopi metalinguistic attention appears to be devoted to either traditional narratives or direct-address genres. Though Shaul, in this volume, is not prepared to view this question as related either to the differential maintenance of narrative and song traditions or to the particulars of local language ideologies, his impressive volume fills a very important niche and is a must-read for students of Hopi and Native American discourse as well as for the larger, non-Americanist readership working at the seams of grammar and discourse. Department of Anthropology University of California, Los Angeles 341 Haines Hall Box 951553 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553 paulvk@ucla.edu East Is East, West Is West: Home Literacy, Culture, and Schooling. Guofang Li. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 225 pp. ADRIENNE LO University of California, Los Angeles East Is East, West Is West: Home Literacy, Culture, and Schooling is an ethnography of literacy practices in the home among four Chinese Canadian families. It is clear, well written, and accessible and will be useful to educators looking for works dealing with the Asian Pacific American experience. The book profiles four Chinese Canadian children from very different backgrounds. Two of the children, both aged 7, come from families with highly educated parents, and Li details the ways in which the parents support literacy at home in both English and Chinese through culturally specific practices like recitation, written copying of stories, and doing worksheets from Chinese textbooks with their parents. Li describes the parents’ own struggles with English as well and their dissatisfaction with the seeming randomness of the “no-textbook, no-homework, and no-exam” Canadian education system. The parents express bewilderment at the kinds of stories their children are taught in school, which seem to contain little moral content, and at the importance the Canadian system seems to place on drawing pictures. Though both sets of families are not well-off, their parents’ involvement as students at the university connects them to a local Chinese community, an important source of knowledge about how to succeed in Canada. These two profiles are contrasted with those of a 7-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl, both born in Canada. Though both sets of parents have been in Canada for a longer period of time than the other two families, the demands of their jobs running restaurants leave them little time for interacting with their children. Because the parents in these families work every day, up to 12 hours per day, they have never taken their children to a park, zoo, library, or museum. In one family with young infants, the children are brought to the restaurant where they stay in a cardboard box near the kitchen, and their limited experiences with literacy come through interactions with the customers. In the other family, child care is delegated to the five VCRs in the house and the accompanying sets of Disney videos. One important theme of the book is the devastating effects of social isolation. Both families who run restaurants live in impoverished neighborhoods and have little social contact, either with white Canadians or other Chinese Canadian families. Their children have no friends and are not allowed out of the house/restaurant due to the dangerous neighborhoods in which they live. Though some of the latter analysis chapters are repetitive and the book could have used a stronger editorial hand to smooth out the writing, East Is East presents a rich portrait of the variation in literacy practices in the Chinese Canadian community. Li’s analysis presents a 290 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology strong case for the argument that the material conditions of immigrant families, in conjunction with parents’ educational background, are important factors to consider in the development of literacy. Department of Anthropology University of California, Los Angeles 375 Portola Plaza Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553 alo@ucla.edu The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Barbara Rogoff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiii ⫹ 434 pp. INGER MEY University of Texas, Austin Central in Barbara Rogoff’s exciting and groundbreaking work on the cultural nature of human development is the dialectical relationship between the individual and society. Rogoff develops her own theory about human development as a cultural process, taking her theoretical inspiration from Lev S. Vygotskij and Alexej N. Leont’ev in the development of their cultural-historical and activity theories. The author’s methodological tools are based on her training in psychology and anthropology, with the latter’s emphasis on ethnographic fieldwork and participant-observation in small local communities. Vygotskij and Leont’ev both applied the dialectics of Marxism to explain the relationships between the cognitive development of the individual and the changing elements and institutions of the community in which the individual is an active member. Barbara Rogoff takes these important ideas and uses them as a starting point for a breathtaking tour of many cultures on many continents, and gives us wonderful illustrations, both in words and images, of how individuals and their cultural practices interact and change in emerging dynamic participation. In the first part of the book (chapters 1, 2, and 3), Rogoff discusses and critiques the theoretical and methodological premises of previous generations of scholars interested in the development of the human mind. She points out that most of the research to date has come from middle-class communities in Europe and North America, and that such research has been assumed to generalize to all people. In the absence of contrasting data from other cultures, authors seem to take their own cultural institutions for granted, viewing differences found in other cultures as deficits. In contrast to this, Rogoff presents Vygotskij’s cultural-historical approach, which “assumes that individual development must be understood in, and cannot be separated from, its social and cultural-historical context” (p. 50). Important in her argument is the notion of “cultural tools for thinking” which children acquire in the presence of skilled and experienced members of the culture, the acquisition taking place in what Vygotskij calls “the zone of proximal development.” The valuable contribution that Rogoff adds to this insight is the precise way in which she sees this process of mutual constituting taking place. In order to emphasize the simultaneity of individual and cultural processes, she positions these processes within participation in sociocultural activities. As people participate in, and contribute to, cultural activities, their involvement brings about changes in both the activities and the participants, just like it has changed the people, the tools, and the practices through generations in the history of the community. Rich ethnographic materials and pictures lend authority to the different chapters in this book. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 give detailed insights into many different child-rearing practices and how these practices make sense in terms of the communities in which they are found. Learning to think and learning various skills are the topics of chapters 7 and 8. Rogoff and other cognitive scientists follow Vygotskij in positing that individual cognitive skills derive from people’s engagement in sociocultural activities. Rather than representing a general ability, cognition appears to be “situated” in specific contexts and learned through specific