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American Anthropologist Vol. 105, No. 1 March 2003 Mike Michael takes a Latourian approach in his study of how "road rage" became a highly public "moral,panic," seen as a symptom of the decay of society in the United Kingdom. While this is an interesting application of Latour's ideas of human-technological hybridity and purification, the study is thin because the discourse it studies is mostly published journalism. In "Driving while Black," Paul Gilroy uses similar material much more effectively. He delivers a powerful historical, cultural, and political analysis of how cars express and constitute class and race in the United States. His critical approach to black consumerism argues that cars can become part of a "culture of compensation" for a legacy of violence and poverty, simultaneously a form of freedom and a means of further bondage. Tom O'Dell's chapter also deals with the complex contradictions of rebellion-through-consumption, in a European social-history approach to Swedish "greasers" and their beloved chromebedecked classic U.S. cars. Here, cars constitute a counteridentity that is contextualized in the particular history of class in Sweden, where cars are supposed to be symbols of middle-class respectability. Pauline Garvey's description of the anomie of disconnected youth in Norway could best be described as Malinowskian functionalism. The transgressions of drinking and driving express a modern need for rebellion in a society that is generally moralistic and conservative about consumption. After this sober account, Jojada Verrips and Birgit Meyer's life history of a taxi and its owner's career in Ghana seems to run in high gear. Their "biography of things" approach shows how cars are localized and reengineered for African realities through scavenging and inspired improvisation. However, the analysis of the adaptation and reuse of industrial material culture by the poor, while intrinsically interesting, is marred in this chapter by problems with translation and terminology. From the body of the car, we move to the embodied driver in Michael Bull's chapter on the "Soundscapes of the Car." He argues that through the senses and sounds of the road and the radio, cars work their way into everyday subjectivities of time, privacy, and freedom. Following a familiar line in recent cultural studies, he argues against the Frankfurt school's notion that modern consumer culture is coercive and oppressive. Instead, he asserts that the driver of a car modifies and uses the environment by singing, listening to books on tape, and otherwise turning the interior into a "symbolic sanctuary." As is usual in cultural studies, his argument is propelled by a very weak engine: decontextualized quotations from anonymous informants. Simon Maxwell's chapter on "Cars in Everyday Life" is the only chapter in the collection with a direct connection to the social and environmental issues raised by modern automotive culture. He asks how English drivers deal on a daily basis with the moral and ethical contradictions of using a car when they know all about its adverse impacts. His formal qualitative research leads him to recognize the nuance and depth of people's relationships with their cars, in the

Last but not least, the index is fabulously complete. For example, the valuable materials on opium are readily accessed in all chapters through the index. This is a book that raises questions about external agents of globalizing forcesmissionaries, tourists, soldiers, traders, and bureaucrats through eras of imperialism, colonialism, national/international wars, and global capital. It also begins to address agency of the locals with identities of their own. Car Cultures. Daniel Miller, ed. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 256 pp.
RICHARD R. W I L K

Indiana University It is significant that the idea for a book on cars and culture did not come from the collection's editor or any of the authors, but from Kathryn Earle, an editor at Berg Publishers. It seemed obvious to her that anthropology and cultural studies must have interesting things to say about this supreme example of industrial material culture. She asked Daniel Miller to put the collection together, thinking that there would already be a good deal of research to draw on. But, as Miller tells us, even though cars are laden with cultural meaning and social significance, anthropology has had little to say about them. Fortunately, this odd blindness toward the modern mundane is fading as a new generation of anthropological studies of modern material culture and technology emerges. In his introduction, Miller points out the obvious limitations of earlier studies of the automobile, which have tended toward a moralistic condemnation of automotive impact on social life, urban planning, and the environment. He argues in favor of integrating this moral and political discourse with a thorough cultural analysis that engages with economists and planners and draws on the particular strengths of anthropology to find content in history, class, ethnicity, and everyday experience. In the process, Miller wants to bring out the positive, intimate, and expressive side of our relationship with cars. The studies he has gathered together are like a sampler box of chocolates, each providing a different taste of analytical and cultural tools and methods, each applied to the same quotidian artifact. Two studies of cars among Australian Aborigines provide the opening and closing chapters. Diana Young's engaging chapter takes a structural and symbolic approach to the adoption and integration of cars into Western Desert culture. She shows how and why Pitj ant j at jar a people have eagerly adopted the car, transforming their lives as they also fit the car into their world. Gertrude Stotz, in contrast, sees the car as a more problematic object. She focuses on the articulation of the car with Northern Territory property ownership, authority, and gender, describing the problems of group ownership. Both articles depict a social context in which cars are owned, used, repaired, and disposed of in very different ways from those that prevail in the United States.

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face of official and environmental discourses that want to flatten everything into costs and benefits. This is an unusual collection that does not push a single theoretical or methodological approach. Instead it puts the car at the center and lets each author take a shot from a different direction. It will connect with most readers' experiences as drivers, owners, and riders of cars, and for this reason it could be a very effective way to reach students and show them how anthropology can illuminate everyday life. It can also serve as a textbook for the distinct kinds of analysis and methodology being deployed in the contemporary anthropology of material culture, which lie on the boundaries with cultural studies and European sociology and ethnology. The chapters are all relatively short, clearly written, and full of interesting and diverse ethnographic detail that will broaden the reader's understanding of an artifact many of us entrust with our lives every day. I will certainly use it in classes on consumer culture, and I would consider it for a class in contemporary theory. Alternative Leadership Strategies in the Prehispanic Southwest. Barbara J. Mills, ed. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. 320 pp.
STEPHEN A. KOWALEWSKI

University of Georgia This volume has many new ideas and interpretations about Hohokam, Chaco, later Pueblo, and Paquime or Casas Grandes archaeology. It has stimulating (but usually unstated) implications for the comparative understanding of middlerange societies elsewhere in the world. It is a book about concepts that link archaeological data to broader generalizations about behavior and institutions. The chapters take in far more than political strategy; in fact, all the chapters are cognizant of the embedded character of power. The authors devote as much time to ritual, economy, production, exchange, and style as they do to the governance of polities perse. Remarkably, all the chapters stay on task. They do not all agree, but they share objectives, they all try out new concepts, and they connect data and theory. Allow a brief analogy, which I will soon abandon. How could 20 archaeologists accomplish such a thing? Can I legitimately infer how the material book in front of me was socially produced? Did it take leadership? If so, what kind? Was there a powerful editor pulling the strings of her puppets, or did the puppets pull each others strings? Aggrandizing academics or cooperative effort? Likewise, the archaeological questionhow did things in the past get accomplished? This is not an easy question in the indigenous Southwest, where leadership and power were certainly present, but hidden, perhaps deliberately, within institutional labyrinths of what Kroeber called "an almost marvelous complexity" (1917:183). For all the impressive costs in labor and materials of Chacoan Great Houses, as W. H. Wills relates in his chapter, none of

the evidence from architecture, iconography, or funerary treatment indicates that there were singular chiefs, as there were in Polynesia or the U.S. Southeast. Organization, strategy, and the potential sources of power and inequality are the themes broached in Barbara Mills's broad and perceptive first chapter. Several chapters voice the caveat that in most instances what archaeologists are getting at is not leadership strategy (at least in the common usage of these words), but organization. Mills also asks the contributors to examine whether models of corporate/network strategies, heterarchy, and complex adaptive systems were useful in their areas of expertise. Gary Feinman provides final commentary in keeping with the book's objectives. In particular, he places Southwestern cases in a conceptual framework of corporate hierarchy. Wills's chapter reconsiders Chacoan great houses. He points out that the amount of labor in the construction of room blocks at great houses far exceeded that of kivas or other overtly ceremonial spaces. Making masonry walls three or more stories high required careful planning and labor allocation; bringing in the timbers must have been a regular, calendrical, massive event staged almost every year for decades. Wills concludes that the labor process in the building of room blocks involved different social segments and secular or nonreligious ritual with a goal of communitas. William Graves and Katherine Spielmann focus on the Rio Grande. They argue that competitive feasting, longdistance exchange, and control over ceremonies "could have been used by aspiring leaders to enhance their prestige and power" (p. 58). This is reasonable. Were there such people, and could or did they do these things to enhance their prestige and power? I will refer to these as the "accusatory" questions, which ask if actors had the potential to increase their prestige, and whether it can be proven that they actually did so. These accusatory questions need to be addressed in several of the articles. Another contribution of the Graves and Spielmann chapter is to describe apparent differences in economic activities among late-period towns in the Rio Grande Valley, a point that is taken up by Kohler et al., discussed below. Two chapters are based on Zuni. James Potter and Elizabeth Perry suggest performance and control of ritual as potential sources of power. They adduce architectural evidence for a PHI to PIV movement of leaders to more secretive spaces while activities among community members were brought into the open. Kivas became smaller and were tucked away in room blocks, while more architectural emphasis was placed on interior plazas. In an amazingly succinct article, Keith Kintigh uses settlement patterns, burials, and ceramics to evaluate three models for the relations among towns in the protohistoric Zuni politycentralized, confederacy of equals, and core-daughter. He shows that the actual situation was more complex than any of the three models allow. Kintigh also contributes insights on spatiotemporal aspects of corporate/network strategies. Scott Van Keuren tries on the difficult problem of getting at power from pottery design and style, specifically the shift