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
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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.