While many Americans have come to see Alzheimer's disease as the worst crisis of old age, one that casts all other concerns about aging in a new and ever more biological light, many Indians now speak of the great crisis of old age in terms of the breakdown of the traditional extended family and its effect upon the elderly. But, as Lawrence Cohen argues, the complex sources of suffering in late life are obscured by such reductions of old age to a master narrative of debility. Bringing together insights from medical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and contemporary South Asian studies, Cohen writes against the reduction of old age to either its biology or history. As the "No Aging" of the book's title suggests, these alarmist modern narratives of suffering old people paradoxically produce a denial of the social reality of the old body, a denial with very real effects on the ability of people worldwide to survive into a good old age.

Cohen draws extensively on years of fieldwork, especially with families and institutions in the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras). He links the everyday politics of when and how old persons are listened to by their children and others with events and processes around India and around the world--the generational dynamics of Indian cinema, advertising, and popular medicine; the formation of international gerontology and its relation to Indian state welfare and social science; and the intensified marketing of senility drugs globally. Cohen's analysis leads us to consider the centrality of the old body in the emergence of colonized elites and in the cultural politics of colonial and postcolonial identity across class. No Aging in India takes us from the study of aging to the idea of age itself. Age is here a form of difference through which groups confront history by representing the social order as a body in time. The resulting analysis moves outward from the phenomenology of senility to images of old age in public culture. Why, for example, is media coverage of poor old women voting so ubiquitous during Indian elections? Why did several Indian prime ministers seek the blessings of a 140-year-old holy man in times of political crisis? Why for decades have young Hindi film actresses lip-synched their songs to the far older voice of singer Lata Mangeshkar?

Medical anthropology, Cohen argues, has spun around in circles by forcing itself to choose between biological, economic, or cultural reductions of bodily phenomena. What is at stake in senility, Alzheimer's, and dementia, he suggests, is poorly served by reducing analysis to the inexorable biology of Alzheimer's, to the medicalization of ageism or poverty, or to the peculiarities of Indian or American social constructions of the body and the self. Cohen struggles with the competing epistemological and moral claims of these reductions in producing provisional, sometimes uncomfortable, but generative accounts of the body in time.

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Beyond Art addresses the appearance and distribution of images and symbols encoded in material culture in prehistory--something collectively termed prehistoric or Paleolithic "art." This topic has received a great deal of attention and has been a subject of much research with ensuing publications. A century of study, however, has not produced a definitive theory about this "art," but rather has brought forth a number of conflicting claims.

The authors address some of the factors responsible for this state of affairs, offer their own suggestions on how to advance their understanding of prehistoric imagery, and begin doing so by decoupling this body of archaeological evidence about past lifeways from its categorization as "art." The authors do because they believe such initial categorization was both based on unwarranted assumptions and constrained one's understanding of the subject matter.

The authors' growing dissatisfaction with past approaches to prehistoric imagery, raised against both insufficient attention directed to concrete times and places when the images were produced and used, against unwarranted uniformitarian assumptions, and against a broadly ahistoric and often decontextualized frame of reference, led them to organize two meetings to examine what they call, broadly speaking, prehistoric imagery from a more archaeological perspective. Specifically, they argue that there was a need to examine this category of archaeological artifacts using an archaeological frame of reference. Beyond Art is the result of those two meetings.

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International Folkloristics, Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore highlights major theories, methods, and concepts in the history of folklore. These essays, some recovered treasures making their first appearance in English, others already established classics, are intellectual milestones in a disciplinary attempt to put some of the central ideas that shaped our history in the past two hundred years to a scientific and systematic test. The often unusual selections range from letters to seminal early articles by scholars in philology, literature, music and psychology--all of whom shared a commitment to folk expressions. Dundes' introductory comments are a tour de force coupling individual biographies and disciplinary history. This anthology is an essential text in any introductory course in folklore and more specifically in a course on the history of folklore studies.

Selections by: Bela Bartok, Seamus O Duilearga, James George Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Kenneth S. Goldstein, Antonio Gramsci, Jacob Grimm, Reinhold Kohler, Kaarle Krohn, Wilhelm Mannhardt, Max Muller, Axel Olrik, Giuseppe Pitre, Vladimir Propp, Geza Roheim, Boris and Yuri Sokolov, William Thoms, Arnold van Gennep, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, and W. B. Yeats.

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Early Settlement at Chiripa, Bolivia reports on the first phase of the Taraco Archaeological Project (TAP) at the site of Chiripa (the field sessions were in 1992 and 1996). Chiripa is one of the earliest sites with architecture in the region. How did such a large and long-lived complex come about and what did it look like politically and socially? How did the ritual acts occurring at such a center as Chiripa relate to the economic activities of daily life? The debate as to why and how these economic, social, and political changes came about is especially apt in the Andean region of South America, where important and seemingly long-term cultural structures of meanings have existed both in the egalitarian concepts of reciprocity and balanced opposition, as well as in hierarchy and stratification. We know that hierarchical structures within the Andean world exist in the nested, ever larger and more important mountain deities, just as in nested communities. There are hints of the existence and manipulation of these ideas in the past, for example, by the Inka who exploited local production using 'reciprocal exchange' strategies to gain labor. How did such concepts form and develop at the onset of permanent community? Early Settlement at Chiripa, Bolivia addresses questions about the onset of political elaboration with a special interest in daily use of things and spaces.

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From the late 1700s, Hawaiian society began to change rapidly as it responded to the impinging world system of capital whose trade routes and markets crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean. Yet the transformation was far from one-sided, and indigenous Hawaiian cultural structures proved as critical to the emerging interaction as those of the European and American newcomers.

Reflecting many years of collaboration between Marshall Sahlins, a prominent social anthropologist, and Patrick V. Kirch, a leading archaeologist of Oceania, Anahulu seeks out the traces of this cultural transformation in a typical local center of the kingdom founded by Kamehameha: the Anahulu river valley of northwestern Oahu.

In this first of two volumes, Sahlins shows the surprising consequences of Hawaii's encounter with the colonizing forces of commerce and Christianity--the distinctive ways the Hawaiian people culturally organized the experience--at various levels, from the structure of the kingdom to the daily life of ordinary people. He examines several agents of change: the Northwest America-Canton fur trade, whose routes passed through the Islands; the export of sandalwood for the China market; the provisioning of the American fleet during the heyday of Pacific whaling; and the beginnings of the cattle and sugar industries.

At no time, Sahlins demonstrates, was the Hawaiian response a simple reflex of the forces or forms of capitalism. Rather, the global-imperialist forces were integrated in and as Hawaiian structures, mediated by Hawaiian cultural order, to produce historical effects undreamed of in any Western philosophy (or social science).

Volume 2, by Patrick V. Kirch, examines the material record of changes in local social organization, economy and production, population, and domestic settlement arrangements. Taken together, the two volumes provide at once the most definitive and invaluable reference on the prehistory and history of Hawaiian society up the late nineteenth century and the fullest realization of the potential of historical anthropology yet available.

Anahulu won the J. I. Staley Prize, awarded by the School of American Research, for the best book in anthropology.

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Naked Science is written for students, scientists, and citizens interested in the question "What is science really like?" Contributors to Naked Science investigate the question in contested domains and different cultures of science--from physics, molecular biology, and primatology, to immunology, ecology, and the medical environment, and on to mathematical and navigational domains.

This volume is about science and power, particularly the power of Western science over other sciences around the globe. Working from the assumption that science is not autonomous, the contributors juxtapose ethnoscience and technoscience research within a planetary frame.

The cultural perspective in Naked Science neither glorifies nor deprecates scientific research, revealing instead a framework for understanding power arrangements in global science. These essays raise questions about deeply held beliefs and assumptions we all carry about scientific communities.

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Few recent phenomena have proved as emblematic of our era, and as little understood, as globalization. Are nation-states being transformed by globalization into a single globalized economy? Do global cultural forces herald a postnational millennium? Tying ethnography to structural analysis, Flexible Citizenship explores such questions with a focus on the links between the cultural logics of human action and on economic and political processes within the Asia-Pacific, including the impact of these forces on women and family life.

Explaining how intensified travel, communications and mass media have created a transnational Chinese public, Aihwa Ong argues that previous studies have mistakenly viewed transnationality as necessarily detrimental to the nation-state and have ignored individual agency in the large-scale flow of people, images, and cultural forces across borders. She describes how political upheavels and global markets have induced Asian investors, in particular, to blend strategies of migration and of capital accumulation and how these transnational subjects have come to symbolize both the fluidity of capital and the tension between national and personal identities. Refuting claims about the end of the nation-state and about "the clash of civilization," Ong presents a clear account of the cultural logics of globalization and makes an incisive contribution to the anthropology of Asia-Pacific modernity and its links to global social change.

Aihwa Ong is author and coeditor of several books, including Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia.

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In Impasse of the Angels, Stefania Pandolfo takes the critical engagement of anthropology to its limit by presenting the relationship between observer and observed as one of interacting equals and mutually constituting subjects. Narrating, debating, and imagining, real characters take center stage and, through their act of speech, invent a people rather than stand for it. Exploring what it means to be a subject in the historical and poetic imagination of a Moroccan society, Impasse of the Angels listens to dissonant and often idiosyncratic voices elaborate the fractures, wounds, and contradictions of the Maghribi postcolonial present. Passionate and lyric, ironic and tragic, it is a transformative narrative experiment traveling the boundary of ethnography and fiction.

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Is there such a thing as "French DNA"? Paul Rabinow, in the course of being a "philosophical observer" to a scientific collaboration between France and the United States, discovered that there is indeed a French DNA, contrary to what most of us would believe. In his story of nations, commerce, patients, and science, Rabinow explores the tangled relations and conceptions that govern modern medical research.

In 1993, an American biotechnology company, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and France's premier genetics lab, the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humaine (CEPH), developed plans for a collaborative effort to discover diabetes genes. The results of this collaboration could have been medically significant and financially lucrative. The two companies had agreed that the CEPH would supply funding and expertise in new technologies to accelerate the identification of the genes, terms that the French government had approved. But in early 1994, just as the collaboration was to begin, the French government abruptly called a halt. The government insisted that under no circumstances could the CEPH be permitted to give the Americans that most precious of all substances--never before named in such a manner--French DNA.

Rabinow's brilliant exposition of the deal gone wrong illuminates those sites where genetics, bioethics, patient groups, venture capital, and the state meet. French DNA is about international competition, the future of human health, ferocious financial conflict, and the intersection of culture and science--the place where, finally, DNA became French.

Review of French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory by The New York Times, October 1999.

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Making PCRis the fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of the invention of one of the most significant biotech discoveries of our time--the polymerase chain reaction. Skillfully blending narrative description and interviews with all the major players, Paul Rabinow explores what it means to be a "scientist" today, the effects of doing science in the high-risk, high-reward environment of biotech, and what a scientific discovery or invention is at a time when it is possible to patent life itself.

PCR has profoundly transformed the practices and potential of molecular biology by extending scientists' ability to identify and manipulate genetic material. It facilitates the identification of precise segments of DNA and accurately reproduces millions of copies of the given segment in a short period of time. It makes abundant what was once scarce--the genetic material required for experimentation. PCR's versatility has been astounding; scientists have produced new contexts and new uses with stunning regularity, which have in turn opened new avenues of research. In less than a decade, PCR has become simultaneously a routine component of every molecular laboratory and a constantly evolving tool whose growth potential shows no sign of leveling off.

Making PCR explores the culture of biotechnology as it emerged at Cetus Corporation during the 1980s and focuses on its distinctive configuration of scientific, technical, social, economic, political, and legal elements, each of which had its own separate trajectory over the preceding decades. The book contains interviews with the remarkable cast of characters who made PCR, including Kary Mullis, the maverick who received the Nobel Prize for "discovering" it, as well as a team of young scientists who chose to work in this high-risk industry rather than pursue more traditional academic careers. Rabinow also includes the perspective of the company's business leaders, some of whom left the more secure fortresses of the multinational pharmaceutical world to engage in a riskier and potentially more rewarding enterprise in terms of work, money, power, and celebrity.

In sum, Making PCRshows how a contingently assembled practice emerged, composed of distinctive subjects, the site in which they worked, and the object they invented.

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In the past decade, commendable efforts to assure "child survival" in the world's harsher environments have occurred primarily on the medical and nutritional fronts. Small Wars departs from earlier studies of child mortality in that it emphasizes cultural ideas of childhood and parenthood and especially the economic and political realities that give rise to "disease," various forms of abuse, and early death. Of particular interest is the inclusion of children's voices, speaking for and about themselves. Children, say the editors, are actively involved in the construction of their own lives and the lives of the people around them. All too often children are seen as the receptacles of education and socialization by adults, forever becoming something else instead of being what they are.

The authors raise questions vital to anthropologists in the global arena, questions about objectivity versus activism, about the prevalence of social and structural violence, and about policies that seem to portray children as innocent victims deserving of protection on the one hand and as criminals and savages on the other. These chapters together lift the study of childhood at the end of the twentieth century to a new level.

More on Nancy Scheper-Hughes.