Book Reviews 627

The Concept of Community: Readings with Interpretations. DAVID W. MINAR and SCOTT GREER, eds. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. xii + 370 pp., index. $7.95 (cloth), $4.95 (paper).

Reviewed by JOHN W. BENNETT Washington University

Here are two “nonbooks”-readers, an- thologies-dealing with the topic of commu- nity, both produced by members of the SO- ciological profession. The concept of “com- munity” is to sociology what ‘‘culture” has been to anthropology: an immensely useful but entirely too broad organizing idea, and these two books neatly illustrate the extreme range of meaning. Like “culture,” “commu- nity” can refer either to a generalized and pervasive essence in human affairs, o r to specific instances of this essence located in time and space-Culture and cultures, Com- munity and communities. The Minar-Greer collection pertains to the first, or generalized, meaning of community; the French anthol- ogy concerns types and varieties of commu- nities. Together, the readers make up a fair introduction to the entire community sphere of thinking in sociology and parts of anthro-

Minar and Greer have a strong humanis- tic orientation, and their reader is full of evocative pieces by people like William Golding, Ruth Benedict, Van Wyck Brooks, Lawrence Durrell, Henri Pirenne-along with a few social science stalwarts like George Homans, C. W. Mills, Daniel Ler- ner, and Edward Shils. But on the whole, the book is a collection of semiphilosophical pieces exploring the meaning of community in the sense of bonds, consensus, love, or the Redfieldian notion of common under- standings (the famous chapter from Folk Culture of Yucatan on the villager’s world view is present).

French is entirely different in mood. The anthology contains a large number of valu- able essays and selections from books de- scribing communities and the relevant di- mensions of community life by people like Conrad Arensberg, Leonard Moss, Edward Banfield, E. Z. Vogt, J. A. Barnes, Robert Dahl, Herbert Gans, Art Vidich, Amos Hawley, and Joel Halpern. Fifteen of the forty-four selections are by anthropologists; the remainder mostly sociologists. French’s

PologY.

introduction clarifies the objective of the book, which is to serve as a reading text for courses on community study and analysis.

Minorities and Politics. HENRY J. TOBIAS and CHARLES E. WOODHOUSE, eds. Al- buquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969. 131 pp., chapter notes. $4.95 (cloth), $2.45 (paper).

Reviewed by PAUL KUTSCHE Colorado College

The introduction and five case studies in this collection aim to illustrate and develop theories of Louis Wirth and Clifford Geertz concerning the political roles that ethnic mi- norities can, and are likely to, play. Wirth trichotomized minorities as pluralistic- “seeking toleration for their own way of life along with full civil and economic rights in the host society” (p. 1 ) ; separatist; or mili- tant, in which case success ends the minority status as they dominate other groups. Geertz’ discussion of the integration of tribal cultures into new nations, the jockey- ing for survival of tribal customs as “the price of developing the civic unity that a modern nation requires” (p. 3), is less closely related to Woodhouse’s introductory argument.

A key problem with minorities in any in- dustrially developed nation is that they fill unskilled jobs and that twentieth century in- dustrial processes progressively eliminate these jobs, without providing training to fill skilled occupations. Class-economic interests become political when minorities gain enough self-awareness to organize (“Black Power,” the “Alianza”). This is the point at which Woodhouse wishes to begin his analysis: “the conditions under which minorities inter- pret their situations in the larger society as ones in which political considerations be- come relevant or . . . remain irrelevant to status interests” (p. 5 ) .

Among the five case studies in the book, “inflation of opportunity” characterizes the environment in which Russian Jews of the nineteenth century, Southwestern U.S. His- panos of the twentieth, and contemporary U.S. Negroes have expanded their demands and achievements. “Constriction of opportu- nity” led to self-exclusion from national pol- itics by the French of Quebec. Sandia Pueblo is a special case because its proxim- ity to Albuquerque and its protection by the

Bureau of Indian Affairs permit its members to enjoy the economic fruits of industrial America (they apparently face no discrimi- nation on the job market) while their com- munity life remains as cohesive and intro- spective as ever.

The five case studies that Woodhouse summarizes and discusses in the introduc- tion are uneven in length, scholarship, and the skill with which they present new evi- dence or synthesize old.

Tobias reviews Russian Jewish political history clearly and authoritatively. Few of his data are reported in the general histories of Russia, which also say little about Jewish participation in revolutionary thought and action. Tobias speculates that the toughen- ing that resulted from centuries of persecu- tion under Tsarist regimes may have “played an important role in the survival of the Jews” (p. 37) in the contemporary world in general. I wish he had speculated and gener- alized further.

English Canada, says Marcel Rioux, has permitted the QuebeGois sometimes more, sometimes less, political autonomy. The election of Trudeau as prime minister in 1968 set back the aspirations of the French and may lead to conflict. Rioux’s detailed discussion of party maneuverings within the last decade strikes me as more journalistic than scholarly and leaves me unsure whether the whole picture, including the his- torical perspective, might not look very dif- ferent when the next election results are tab- ulated.

The only author who bothers seriously to document factual statements is Frances Swa- desh in “The Alianza Movement of New Mexico.” She sets out to describe the histori- cal background of the Alianza and to look at its recent history through the eyes of Mexican public opinion (through stories in Mexican newspapers) and in the light of Mexican systems of land tenure. This is an exceedingly difficult task for a number of reasons. A definitive history of New Mexi- can land has yet to be written, and crucial gaps in the New Mexican archives (partly occasioned by the negligence-perhaps criminal-af U.S. territorial governors) make it problematical that it can ever be. Hence, the validity of the Alianza’s claims is a dim issue filled with heat and smoke. Swa- desh is passionately partisan on the subject,

628 American Anthropologist [72, 19701

but she manages to keep her private opin- ions mostly out of this essay. She draws on her long familiarity with Mexico to demon- strate the cultural continuity on both sides of the Rio Grande. Such perspective, while growing among students of Hispanic US., is still rare. In this paper plus her 1968 review of the same movement (in Spanish-Speaking People in the United States, Proceedings of AES annual meeting), Swadesh presents the best documentation yet available (or proba- bly soon to be available) of events concern- ing the Alianza. Her analysis is marred only by ambiguity-maybe ambivalence?- whether the Alianza is a revitalization move- ment or not. In 1968 she said “It is my con- tention that . . . the answer is no” (1968:163). In 1969 she quotes Wallace’s speculation about the fate of given move- ments, together with an opposite assertion, almost as categorical as the earlier one: “The author is convinced that the Alianza movement is developing in accordance with the classic form of innovative movements in conflict situations with revolutionary over- tones” (p. 82). The serious test of the revi- talization hypothesis by the data that Swa- desh herself painstakingly provides will have to be performed by someone else.

Suzanne Simons’ short paper on Sandia is tantalizing because scarcely any literature exists on this Rio Grande pueblo. These twenty-seven pages, based entirely on her own fieldwork, describe the anomaly of a village that is virtually a suburb of Albuquer- que, whose inhabitants go to colleges and trade schools, have skilled or semiskilled jobs in the city, consume the goodies of American production, yet return figuratively and literally to the kiva for all functions concerning the welfare of the pueblo. Two statements about cooperation surprise the reviewer: “Flexibility in the composition of the domestic unit provides important social security, as no Sandia, adult o r child, need be left destitute or uncared for,” and “The larger kindred group creates a pool from which Sandias may draw economic or other assistance” (both p. 93). In most pueblos, wage labor strains severely against the shar- ing ethic. In the Eastern Woodlands, where I did my own Amerindian fieldwork, well- paid and steady wage labor sounded a death knell to the family and community sharing that were so important traditionally. I hope

Book Reviews 629

that Simons develops this theme fully when she publishes at greater length.

Roger Banks’ polemical paper on Albu- querque Negroes reads like something ripped off between the incessant meetings and ad- ministrative detail work of a harried politi- cian-bureaucrat. If this guess is accurate, then my sympathy and commiseration go to him, and sharp criticism to the editor who failed to edit. Banks boils down to this: Ne- groes came to New Mexico late and work largely in professions. Proletarian Negroes in Albuquerque are too few to provide their own leadership, are avoided like lepers by professional-class Negroes, and live on the sufferance of the more numerous Hispanos. No leaders, no followers, no political move- ment.

Taken as a whole, the book doesn’t CO- here as well as it would if the case studies were less heterogeneous. A suspicion lingers that papers were included as much because they were available as because they were ap- propriate. Woodhouse ignores a dichotomy that in my opinion begs to be analyzed: the histories of land-based minorities versus those that have only race, class, or status. The QuebeGois, Hispanos, and Sandias all hold tenaciously to their land, and to cul- tural patterns that originate in Neolithic SO-

lutions to the problems of community living. Jews and Negroes have radically different positive sources of integration. Is this vol- ume another example of the bias of sociolo- gists (Woodhouse is a sociologist, Tobias a historian) away from evolutionary perspec- tive?

The value of this collection of essays to social scientists is likely to be the sum of its parts.

ETHNOLOGY Kwakiutl Ethnography. FRANZ BOAS. Helen

Codere, ed. Chicago & London: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1966 (publication date 1967). xxxvii + 439 pp., figures, map, plates, 5 appendices, bibliography, index. $12.50 (cloth).

Reviewed by WAYNE SUTILES Portland State University

Franz Boas began work with the Kwak- iutl Indians of British Columbia in 1886 and during his long life published some five thousand pages on them. Much of this mate-

rial consists of volumes of texts in the Kwakiutl language, mainly collected by his collaborator George Hunt and edited and in- terpreted by himself, each volume describing one or a few features of Kwakiutl culture. He published no single account of the whole. At his death in 1943, he left an un- finished manuscript, Kwakiutl Ethnography, that constitutes about three-fourths (over three hundred pages) of the present work. About half of the manuscript was on the winter ceremonial (the “secret societies” of his early works), the rest on “religion” (sha- manism, sorcery, magic), social organiza- tion, and war, with fragments on the life cycle, gestures, medicine, games, etc. In her preface, Codere recounts the subsequent his- tory of the manuscript and the origins of the book. After Boas’s death, the manuscript was in the hands of Ruth Benedict. In the late 1940s she discussed its publication with Codere, who had been working with Boas’s published material on the Kwakiutl. It was not turned over to Codere, however, until 1958, by which time she was (understand- ably) committed to research elsewhere, In addition to such practical delays, she says, there were “further delays because of prob- lems connected with the incomplete nature of the manuscript and the development in anthropology of a group of very active and very harsh critics of Boas.” The critics de- plored the fact that Boas had not produced the “over-all, synthesized account” of the Kwakiutl; it appeared that the manuscript had been intended to be that account; and yet it “lacked certain essential topics” and “contained only fragmentary materials on others.” Benedict had wanted Codere to write the “missing sections,” but she felt un- equal to that task. For a long time she worked, instead, on what was to be “an im- mense index and data retrieval system” that would “take care of all lacunae and would aid exploitation of the thousands of pages of Kwakiutl material.” However, she gave this task up when the emerging result seemed too cumbersome to solve any problems and also contrary to Boas’s own principles. The absence of indexes in his works she takes to be evidence of a low opinion “of the utility of an index for data that must be considered in context or of the quality of the scholar- ship . . . dependent on one.” Finally, at Paul Bohannan’s suggestion, she decided to con-