Reviews Platenkamp, Jos D.M. and Almut, Schneider (eds.) 2019. Integrating strangers in society: perspectives from elsewhere. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 229 pp. Hb.: €96.29. ISBN: 978-3-030-16702-8. There are issues any anthropologist face, notwithstanding her or his field of expertise. Among them is the position assigned to him or her by the people he or she is working with in the field, especially when these are not from his or her own society. Most societies do not have a conceptual slot for anthropologists, but all of them have concepts of strangers that occupy specific positions in their respective systems of values and relationships. It is in these terms that people classify and process the anthropological ‘strangers by vocation’, as Jos Platenkamp (p. 2) has it in his introduction. This volume importantly contributes to a comparative study of ideas of strangers, an issue that has found relatively little attention despite extensive debates on migration and globalisation. It offers 12 case studies from various parts of the world of how anthropologists were treated in their host societies. These are much more than personal recollections. The anthropologist’s experience posits as an example of how various people conceptualise strangers and how they interpret them in terms of their systems of relationships. Some societies deny strangers membership, but accept them benevolently as recorders of their traditions, such as the Inuit studied by Frédéric Laugrand and Anja Nicole Stuckenberger. Others turn strangers into members only under exceptional circumstances. The Sinti Elisabeth Tauber worked with considered her as an outsider even after she had married a Sinto, but when her son was stillborn, she thereby gained a relationship with a dead member of society, the most unifying relationship the Sinti know. Still others, like the Siassi of Papua New Guinea with whom Pieter ter Keurs worked, consider themselves as newcomers on their land, strangers of sorts and thereby quite open to the researcher. Importantly, as Barraud and Platenkamp point out in their studies of Eastern Indonesia, certain societies consider themselves incomplete without strangers. Especially in exchange-oriented societies in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, a combination of identity and alterity was necessary to gain membership. Jos Platenkamp among the Tobelo or Almut Schneider among the Gawigl of Papua New Guinea needed both consanguines and partners for affinal exchange in order to have any meaningful agency. Christian Strümpell gives an intricate and sensitive account of the various relationship terms, shifting between a kind of conditioned consanguinity and affinity that the ethnically diverse residents of an Indian steel town applied to him. The codes by which anthropologists were integrated vary as well. Kinship is an obvious example, but in Bunyoro, Uganda, choosing a name of familiarity was a condition for developing relationships of trust for Raphaela von Weichs. For Joseba Estévez’ research on Yao Mun cosmology in Laos, acquiring ritual expertise turned out to be crucial. Thus, while the volume stresses local categories of strangers, the input of the anthropologists also influences the choice of categories. Colonialism forms a constant undercurrent in many of these accounts. Both for the anthropologists and the people they worked with, colonial past and globalised present, often intimately related, had shaped the relational system that strangers were posited in. This takes centre stage in Toon van Meijl‘s account of how the Māori cast him in the role of an advocate of their cultural rights. The Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2020) 28, 3 781–783. © 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists. doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12912 781 782 REVIEW Māori, as van Meijl points out, have produced their own anthropologists and are constantly engaged with their role in national politics and culture – thus, they do have a conceptual slot for anthropologists. However, using a stranger as speaker was a continuation of the modesty of traditional chiefs. Without exception, these studies are enlightening, clearly written and densely argued. What the book is lacking, though, is a thorough engagement with earlier literature both on the integration of anthropologists and the social role of the stranger. Especially an overview of the latter subject would have been helpful, as the respective literature is fairly scattered. In its approach of analysing societies from the way they conceptualise strangers, the present volume is unique and innovative. Especially under current conditions of growing xenophobia, it presents significant alternatives to national-modern discourses. It provides excellent material for teaching anthropological methods and the reflective mode of knowledge that anthropological fieldwork engenders. But it also contributes to a project not yet fully formed – the comparative study of strangers as part of social structure and process. Guido Sprenger Heidelberg University (Germany) sprenger@eth.uni-heidelberg.de Gagné, Karine. 2018. Caring for glaciers: land, animals, and humanity in the Himalayas. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 231 pp. Pb.: US$30.00. ISBN: 978029574 4001. Caring for glaciers is a rich and timely ethnography exploring the ethical dimension of human entanglement with the non‐human world in the Ladakh region of Himalayan India. Drawing on 20 months of fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2016, and emphasising the perspective of older Buddhist farmers and herders in the Sham area of lower Ladakh, Gagné discusses shifting attitudes towards environmental obligations against a background of accelerating climate change. Arguing for the moral significance of ‘mundane activities’ (p. 166), the author demonstrates how social life, agro‐pastoralism and ritual practices all contribute to an ‘ethics of care’ rooted in the interdependence of humans, animals and the environment (p. 9). She highlights the challenges posed to this moral order by rapid social and environmental change, precipitated by the reconfiguration of Ladakh as a strategically important border area and by the retreat of the mountain glaciers that form the primary source of the region’s fragile water supply. Despite the title, readers should not expect a narrowly focused environmental ethnography. The first half of the book deals with the impact of social and political developments in Ladakh over the past 70 years: the economic disruption brought about by integration into India (Chapter One); the legacy of trauma caused by the 1947–1948 Indo‐Pakistani War (Chapter Two); and the ongoing militarisation of Ladakh (Chapter Three). These initial chapters provide the context for Gagné’s argument, describing the disruption of traditional agro‐ pastoralist activities and the consequent breakdown of reciprocal relations with the land. The author sees the displacement of Ladakh’s subsistence economy by increasing development (and the ever‐ larger military presence in the region) as undermining traditional ethical responsibilities towards the environment, accompanied by the erosion of the ‘wisdom, knowledge, and community arrangements’ that formerly defined Ladakhi society (p. 91). It is in the second half that © 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists.