War, Exile, Everyday Life: Cultural Perspectives:War, Exile, Everyday Life: Cultural Perspectives

for analyses of "current transformations of working classes elsewhere" (p. 199). Power gained from understanding ideologies embedded in great economic enterprises is especially relevant when derived from everyday identities such as those based on family, friendship, cultural expressions, and nationalism. Thus it matters a great deal whether, on the one hand, a sense of belonging to a project enables workers to initiate reforms or create unions, or whether, on the other, such a sense becomes a barrier to social change. Finally, the author has introduced the gender dimension rather timidly in certain parts of her study, and I agree with her claim that it should be further developed.

War, Exile, Everyday Life: Cultural Perspectives. REN ATA JAMBRE&C KIRIN and MAJA POVRZANOVIC, eds. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 1996. x + 305 pp., contributors, notes, references. MARKO ZIVKOVIC The University of Chicago This volume includes articles based on papers presented at the international conference "War, Exile, Everyday Life" held in Zagreb in the spring of 1995. The authors focus on refugees and displaced persons, primarily in Croatia, but also in several other European countries. Like its 1993 predecessor volume Fear, Death and Resistance, An Ethnography of War: Croatia 1991-1992 (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research), this volume is a testament to the dilemmas experienced by Croatian ethnologists during the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the war that was waged on Croatian territory. Faced with existential dilemmas posed by war and extreme suffering, marginalized by a state bent on national homogenization, and trying to reconcile their roots in Mitteleuropean folklore studies with postmodern reflexivity, the new generation of Croatian ethnologists—who are the main driving force behind both collections—responded courageously by active practical involvement combined with theoretical reflection and by increased engagement with their European and U.S. colleagues. The question animating the collection could be formulated as, What can anthropology do for refugees? The essays are divided into five sections. The papers in the first set much of the agenda through a critique of the relief model, humanitarian aid, and psycho-social projects. Barbara Harrell-Bond argues that the relief model favors bureaucracies whose maintenance depends on the continued existence of visible concentrations of people who attract funds earmarked for refugees (p. 26). Under this wasteful logic it could happen, for instance, that a request for funds to install an adequate sewage and water system in a (Croatian) village hosting refugees is rejected, while a request for fax machines, computers, vehicles, and other paraphernalia for running the relief program is approved (p. 27). Harrell-Bond argues that instead of maintaining refugees as objects of humanitarian relief, funds should be used to take advantage of the development potential of displaced persons and their hosts

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(p. 24). Paul Stubbs extends Harrell-Bond's critique of the relief model to discourses and practices of humanitarian aid and psycho-social support. He argues that humanitarian aid serves to dis-integrate and promote competition, tension, and misunderstanding among groups. Psycho-social projects construct "vulnerable groups" needing expert help, thus promoting divisions "produced by outsiders and not by the people themselves" (p. 35). Stubbs explains that ethnologists and anthropologists contributing to the volume object to these crude categorizations (that reduce people to "cases," expressions of hurt and pain to "symptoms," and processes of healing to "treatment") as insufficiently based in the complexities of everyday life and as inadequate for social praxis (p. 35). The papers in the third section examine the particular histories of displacement and the actual experiences of various groups in exile—Croats from Kosovo (Ger Duijzings) and Vojvodina (Nives RitigBeljak), Istrian Italians (Pamela Ballinger), Bosnian children and their mothers in Slovenia (Natalija Vrecer), and Eritrean refugees in Greece (Marina Petronoti). Although the authors of this section raise some methodological and theoretical issues, they offer primarily ethnographically rich factual accounts of concrete cases, among which I found Duijzings's to be the most interesting. The papers in the fourth section deal with concrete art activities (music, dance, theater), organized by and for the refugees, that help them reestablish their self-respect, which has been "jeopardized by marginalization and disempowerment'' (p. 12). These activities are aimed both at strengthening the community's cultural identity and at stimulating cross-cultural communication between the refugee community and the larger society. A number of projects that apparently worked quite well are documented in this section—the Resonant Community Project (Skyllstad) and the project Azra (Pettan) in Norway, for instance—and could provide useful models for researchers and activists engaged in similar work with refugee populations elsewhere. Dilemmas that plague researchers who work with refugees and displaced persons most explicitly surface in the editors' introduction and in the concluding remarks to the fifth section. Ina-Maria Greverus describes a controversy "between the compilers of (the others') testimonies for an ethnography of war and exile (not to say another memorial marathon of others' suffering) and the claimants for the integration of refugees and displaced persons and their liberation from the state of professional victims" (p. 282). It seems that efforts of Croatian ethnologists to document the suffering of refugees were seen by some participants in the conference (Ina-Marie Greverus and Glenn Bowman, whose paper is conspicuously absent from the volume, even though it is amply cited by both sides in the dispute) as "overprotective" of their ethnic identity and as contributing to "the political instrumentalization of the displaced person and the refugee as a professional victim" (p. 281). While this accusation seems unfair, at least in view of the actual writing of Croatian ethnologists in this volume, the way these same authors go about clarifying their position leaves much to be desired. Their repudiations of

Creverus and Bowman's criticisms in the introduction are agonizing and indignant rather than clear and cogent (pp. 8-9). The essays in the second section, which aim at addressing "some ambiguities regarding the status of refugees' personal narratives, testimonies and autobiographical writings at the intersection of legal processes, media dominated public arenas, scholarly writings, and history as a discourse" (p. 13), are unfortunately saddled by heavy jargon, convoluted writing styles, and insufficient clarification of local context, all of which will at times confuse even a well-informed reader. This is a pity. It would be well to moderate these sometimes facile deconstructions of ethnic or national belonging, and the celebration of hybridity and multiculturalism (to which so many Western anthropologists are prone) by clear arguments attempting to reappraise the real power and social reality of ethnic identification, especially as it took place under such extreme circumstances as prevailed in the former Yugoslavia. As Herman Bausinger put it in his concluding remarks to the volume, celebration of hybrid tendencies in people and their culture could be felt as counterproductive: in their camps and in foreign countries refugees feel themselves to be Bosnians, Croats, etc.—for they have been expelled because they were Bosnians or Croats. In this situation, it is not only acceptable but useful and sensible to build upon the foundations of their origins and the traditions they have brought along, to make them proud of their culture and to strengthen their cultural identity, [p. 291]

The Politics of Diversity: Immigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey Park, California. JOHN HORTON, with the assistance of JOSE CALDER6N, MARY PARDO, LELAND SAITO, LINDA SHAW, and YEN-FEN TSENG. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. x + 273 pp., illustrations, index.

American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins. SARAH J. MAHLER. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. xiv + 268 pp., illustrations, maps, index.

Multiculturalism from the Margins: Non-Dominant Voices on Difference and Diversity. DEAN A. HARRIS, ed. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995. xvif + 193 pp., index. KATHWESTON Arizona State University West An older Anglo woman considers giving up her morning walk in the park because the "hostile" gestures (Tai Chi exercises!) of Chinese immigrants frighten her. A cement deer eyes the lotus underneath a statue of the Buddha on someone's front lawn. A Latino questions the presence of a Chinese lion in "our" Cinco de Mayo celebration. A young Salvadoran poses on the hood of a stranger's sports

car while a friend snaps a photograph of the "successful" sojourner for relatives back home. When Don Jos£ first arrives in California looking for skyscrapers, he wrestles with disappointment: "There are houses everywhere in El Salvador like this one!" (Mahler, p. 84). Immigration and race politics have arrived in suburbia. From Long Island in the east (Mahler) to Monterey Park in the west (Horton), social scientists have practiced their own form of chain migration, following in the wake of earlier migrants to pursue a dream of streets paved with research subjects—the abroad come "home." Of course, immigration and race/class politics have shaped suburbia from its inception. The parts played by bank redlining and real estate blockbusting in the promotion of white flight to the suburbs have often been recounted. Less frequently acknowledged in tales of suburbia are historically black burbs, outlying neighborhoods that symbolized a step up from central-city Chinatowns, and Latino villages engulfed by an expanding metropolis. Still, the new multiethnic suburbs merit new scholarly attention, if only because they are sufficiently at odds with entrenched representations of America's urban periphery as entirely middle-class and white. All the books under review touch on well-worn themes in the multicultural debates that have rocked the United States. Although the essays in the Harris collection do not focus on suburbia per se, like the other books it is concerned with the struggle over the meaning and appropriation of tradition, the bearing of difference on citizenship, the concept of group (corporate) rights, and the fate oi 19th-century "one people, one land, one language" ideologies of nationalism in the variegated urban landscapes of the 21st century. All three volumes also examine, to varying degrees, the untidiness that diasporas introduce into time-honored social science models. Each covers fresh ground as well: an examination of the indentured servitude created by restrictive immigration laws (Mahler); bilingualism for everyone (John A. Garcia in Harris); the stakes attached to conflicting narrations of history (Lucius T. Outlaw in Harris); tensions between Enlightenment thought and identity politics (Cheryl Zarlenga Kerchis and Iris Marion Young in Harris); factors that undermine solidarities based upon shared identities (Horton, Mahler); the speciousness of the "special rights" argument, especially in its anti-gay formulation (Robert Dawidoff in Harris); and what can only be called the political economy of disillusionment (Mahler). John Horton reports the findings of a multiethnic research team that used interviews, observation, exit polls, and an array of other methods to study social relations in Monterey Park, "the American mainland's first majority-Asian city" (p. 3), from 1988 through 1994. Rather than add to the growing number of cost-benefit analyses of immigration, his team designed a community study that approached immigrants and longtime residents as equally integral to the social life of a locale. The Politics of Diversity situates Asians and Asian-Americans at the center of discussions of multiculturalism in a way they have seldom been positioned on the national stage. In the process, Horton and his colleagues go

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