Review: [untitled]Author(s): B. J. AndrewsSource: Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1996), pp. 707-714Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/312993Accessed: 14/12/2010 04:54

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of the nature of one's own, as well as awareness of the loss accepted in living far from home. Dr Stasik detects (p. 41) an occasional sense that the reader is being advised against the whole enterprise of immigration. She connects this rightly with the 'long-established tradition of didactic literature'. One of the early Hindi didactic novels deserves mention in this context because of its plot: Lajjaram Sharma's Hindu grhasth 'A Hindu Household' (I905), dealing with the journey of a young 'anti-hero' corrupted by western influ- ences (as were most of the 'villains' of the didactic novels) to London, and his improbable but short-lived success while residing there. The immigrants of the present fiction are of course 'true heroes' (their experiences not being contrasted with those of others who live in accordance with perceived norms of virtue), but their experience illustrates that in the modern age too, a life lived 'out of India' can be seen as something less than desirable.

Chapter IV identifies particular aspects of the Indian immigrant's life abroad which are a focus for cross-cultural reactions. A cumulative picture of inter-cultural experience is built up. Individual motifs from the texts are interpreted with insight, with frequent reference to sociological studies (especially those of Hall and Goffman). Topics dealt with include difficulties across the whole field of communication (linguistic and extra-linguistic), encountering different physical conditions, finding work, and encountering prejudice and discrimination. Dr Stasik is generally careful not to make more of her conclusions about individual motifs (which can represent fleeting reactions of her characters) than these conclusions will readily bear, and this is a further aspect of her good judgment. She rightly does not seek to construct a consistent model of inter-cultural contact.

This excellent study by Danuta Stasik makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Indian community outside India, and to our under- standing of Indian culture and its nurturing of those brought up within its fold.

University of Cambridge STUART MCGREGOR

Colonizing the Body. State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. By DAVID ARNOLD University of California Press, I993. Public Health in British India. Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine I850-I9I4. By MARK HARRISON Cambridge History of Medicine Series, Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1994.

These books are two of the latest additions to the rapidly-growing field of the history of imperial medicine. David Arnold's book is the culmination of many years of work on Indian and colonial responses to epidemic disease in India, while Mark Harrison is presenting a revised version of his doctoral thesis, completed in I99i.1 Both scholars refer to each other's work, and their subject matter overlaps to a certain degree. The approach to the subject

1 I am indebted to Andrew Cunningham, David Forgacs, Arne Hessenbruch, Ajay Skaria, Jiirgen Stoldt and particularly to Molly Sutphen for their helpful discussions and comments while this review was being prepared.

of the nature of one's own, as well as awareness of the loss accepted in living far from home. Dr Stasik detects (p. 41) an occasional sense that the reader is being advised against the whole enterprise of immigration. She connects this rightly with the 'long-established tradition of didactic literature'. One of the early Hindi didactic novels deserves mention in this context because of its plot: Lajjaram Sharma's Hindu grhasth 'A Hindu Household' (I905), dealing with the journey of a young 'anti-hero' corrupted by western influ- ences (as were most of the 'villains' of the didactic novels) to London, and his improbable but short-lived success while residing there. The immigrants of the present fiction are of course 'true heroes' (their experiences not being contrasted with those of others who live in accordance with perceived norms of virtue), but their experience illustrates that in the modern age too, a life lived 'out of India' can be seen as something less than desirable.

Chapter IV identifies particular aspects of the Indian immigrant's life abroad which are a focus for cross-cultural reactions. A cumulative picture of inter-cultural experience is built up. Individual motifs from the texts are interpreted with insight, with frequent reference to sociological studies (especially those of Hall and Goffman). Topics dealt with include difficulties across the whole field of communication (linguistic and extra-linguistic), encountering different physical conditions, finding work, and encountering prejudice and discrimination. Dr Stasik is generally careful not to make more of her conclusions about individual motifs (which can represent fleeting reactions of her characters) than these conclusions will readily bear, and this is a further aspect of her good judgment. She rightly does not seek to construct a consistent model of inter-cultural contact.

This excellent study by Danuta Stasik makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Indian community outside India, and to our under- standing of Indian culture and its nurturing of those brought up within its fold.

University of Cambridge STUART MCGREGOR

Colonizing the Body. State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. By DAVID ARNOLD University of California Press, I993. Public Health in British India. Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine I850-I9I4. By MARK HARRISON Cambridge History of Medicine Series, Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1994.

These books are two of the latest additions to the rapidly-growing field of the history of imperial medicine. David Arnold's book is the culmination of many years of work on Indian and colonial responses to epidemic disease in India, while Mark Harrison is presenting a revised version of his doctoral thesis, completed in I99i.1 Both scholars refer to each other's work, and their subject matter overlaps to a certain degree. The approach to the subject

1 I am indebted to Andrew Cunningham, David Forgacs, Arne Hessenbruch, Ajay Skaria, Jiirgen Stoldt and particularly to Molly Sutphen for their helpful discussions and comments while this review was being prepared.

REVIEWS REVIEWS 707 707

differs considerably, however. Harrison explores the 'theoretical, profes- sional, and administrative aspects' of the development of public health in British India, thereby privileging the colonial medical administration. By contrast, Arnold takes the body as a site of contestation between rulers and ruled, and brings the historical contests to life through his careful accounts of Indian responses to the catastrophic epidemics of smallpox, cholera and plague, and to the British attempts to contain and control them.

Both of these books devote considerable attention to the work of an Indian scholar of modern medicine in colonial India. In Radhika Ramasubban's publications the medical establishment of British India is characterized as overridingly concerned with maintaining the health of Europeans in their colonial enclaves, and particularly with preserving the health of the army.2 She further argues that the colonial administration was not only unheedful of the health needs of the majority of the Indian population (in spite of the censure of the international sanitary conferences), but that the British also actively discouraged Indian sanitary initiatives.3 While neither Arnold nor Harrison attempts to deny the medical enclavism inherent in the Indian Medical Service, both insist that the potential of the colonial regime to intervene medically, without the consent of the Indian population, was extremely limited. Indeed, the idea of the body-physical and political-as a site of active contest is the leitmotif of Arnold's book. Harrison, too, shows the British administrators repeatedly invoking real or feared unrest as obs- tacles to the feasibility of specific medical interventions.

This resistance of the indigenous population to sanitary intervention is Arnold's and Harrison's answer to the Indian accusation of complacent self-interest on the part of colonial administrators in India. Neither of the British works under review deny the limitations of British medical provision for the Indian population, but they clearly see a need to balance the national- ist bias in the work of Indian scholars such as Ramasubban. It is perhaps unfortunate that in their efforts to establish a more even-handed approach to the historical record, they occasionally give the impression of writing defensive justifications of the activities of the British administration.

A few minutes spent perusing Arnold's, Harrison's and even Ramasub- ban's notes and bibliographies shows that while all three historians draw very heavily on the official publications of the colonial authorities, it is David Arnold who pays most attention to the views of the Indian population, as expressed in personal memoirs and vernacular newspapers. Mark Harrison also refers repeatedly to the English-language periodicals of British India, several of which were owned or run by Indians. These efforts to reproduce

2 Mainly adversarial comments on her work appear seven times in Harrison's

book, and four times in Arnold's, not including implicit references to 'nationalist historians.' See Radhika Ramasubban, Public Health and Medical Research in India: Their Origins under the Impact of British Colonial Policy. Stockholm: SAREC, 1982; 'Imperial Health in British India, i857-1900', in Disease, MAedicine and Empire: Perspect- ives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, edited by Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis, London: Routledge, 1988. 3 Ramasubban, 'Imperial Health', 54-5.

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more than just one side's views of the history of imperialism constitute the main innovation in imperial history-writing in recent years.4

To return to the books under review: in Colonizing the Body, David Arnold gives us a skilful demonstration of how wit and style may bring a smile to even the most serious of historians' lips. Arnold's prose is crystal clear throughout, and he has a rare ability to bring archival material vividly to life. There is also a welcome sensitivity to jargon, and several technical terms, such as 'nosology', and 'conservancy', are fluently expained on their first appearance. This book is clearly intended to be accessible to a wider reading public than just historians of medicine, and the approach has signi- ficant implications for imperial history generally.

The book is organized in a clear chronological progression from the ways in which western medicine in India defined itself in relation to the health and medical traditions of Indians (chapter one, 'Occidental therapeutics, oriental bodies'), and the medical practice of the army and prison services (the 'Colonial Enclaves' of chapter two), through to the contests between Indian and European visions of the appropriate management of smallpox (chapter three), cholera (chapter four) and plague (chapter five). Each of these three 'disease' chapters is a reworking of an earlier publicationl incorp- orating some new material and building on the theme of the growing colon- ization of the Indian body.5 Having concentrated up to this point on Indian resistance to British epidemic disease management, Arnold devotes his last chapter to the question of health and hegemony. The increasing frequency with which Indian elites adopted the 'cultural rhetoric and political author- ity of Western medicine' in the years to 1914 indicates to Arnold that medi- cine was, by then, already part of the 'realm of cultural and political hege- mony' that the new Indian urban middle classes were keen to adopt as part of their own hegemonic agenda.

This final change of emphasis, from Indian resistance to western medicine to its adoption by the emerging political elite, sits rather uneasily with the theme of the book as a whole. Disappointingly, Arnold skirts the challenge of explaining why certain Indians adopted western medicine as part of their own programme, appealing instead to Gramsci's rather convenient notion of the importance of' "spontaneous" consent' to the maintenance of hege- mony (p. 242). The chapter is full of suggestive avenues through which the question (of why Indians turned to western medicine) could be explored. Indeed, the sub-headings--hospitals and dispensaries, midwives and women doctors, patronage and leadership, municipal government, and health, race

4 This trend is best exemplified for the history of India by the series Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha, of which the first volume appeared in I982. The series has been reviewed by Rosalind O'Hanlon in Modern Asian Studies 22, I (I988), pp. I89-224.

5 The original publications are: 'Cholera and colonialism in British India', Past and Present, 113 (i986), iI8-51; 'Touching the body: perspectives on the Indian plague, I896-1900', in R. Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies V (Delhi, 1987), pp. 55-90; and 'Smallpox and colonial medicine in nineteenth-century India', in Arnold (ed.), Imperialism and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, i988), pp. 45-65.

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and nation-could be fruitfully taken as the chapter headings of a fuller treatment of this very interesting question.

In any case, the topic of the colonization of the body does not reappear in Arnold's conclusion. This seems to me to be a missed opportunity. Per-

haps the most interesting feature of the history of the spread of the western sciences under imperialism is the way in which the authority of science has become almost universally accepted world-wide, even after the end of formal colonization. If this book is 'a study of a colonizing process, rather than a history of Western medicine in India' (Introduction, p. 7), the topic of 'health and hegemony' seems to invite a discussion of the ways in which western medical culture continued apace in its colonization of the Indian body, even while the nationalists were gaining in power and influence.

The great strength of Arnold's approach to the history of medicine in India-or indeed, anywhere-is his ability to shift the focus of his narrative from the viewpoint of the westerners to that of local public opinion. Within his treatment of Indian viewpoints, he deftly distinguishes differences arising from differing locale, class/caste, religion and (occasionally) sex. It is this concern for all the voices in the discourse of the appropriate management of disease that sets Arnold apart from other western historians of imperial medicine (including Harrison). These skills are demonstrated to best advantage in the three central chapters devoted to smallpox, cholera and plague. The local medical tradition is most vividly brought to life for small- pox, where Arnold shows convincingly that far from being obviously super- ior, initial attempts to impose vaccination on the Indian population were hampered as much by inefficiency, inadequate lymph supply and other tech- nical difficulties as by Indian resistance to the procedure. Adequate supplies of calf lymph for vaccination only became available in the late I870s, facilit- ating a gradual downturn in smallpox incidence in the years to I914.

Similarly, it is refreshing to be reminded that far from being the bearers of a miracle-working medical science, the British and their troops actually caused the pan-Indian epidemics of cholera by marching infected troops inland from the trading ports. Moreover, in their helplessness against the disease, British medics were often prepared to borrow therapies from native practitioners, after stripping them of their religious significances. Arnold also mentions British cynicism in its opposition to the theory of contagion with respect to cholera, since acceptance of cholera's contagious nature would imply the necessity of quarantine measures for British trading vessels and substantial losses of revenue. This theme is taken up more fully by Harrison.

Finally, the chapter on plague highlights the importance of Indian resist- ance in delineating the extent of imperial control over Indian bodies. Although Europeans in India hardly fell victim to the disease at all, the international community threatened crippling trade sanctions unless the Government of India took drastic action to curb the spread of the dread disease. When, however, they did so, awarding themselves unprecedented powers to police the Indian community, Indian resistance was so great that the Government was forced to retreat in the face of the 'absolute impossibil- ity of fighting both the epidemic and the people' (p. 231). The force of

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Indian feeling is nicely captured in Arnold's rendering of common plague rumours. He uses these to great effect to highlight the divisions in Indian society caused by the colonial state: antagonism towards the British coupled with suspicion of their Indian 'collaborators'; but also the emergence of a middle class, educated in English, for whom the wilder rumours were a source of shame and contempt.

In all three of these 'disease' chapters, and especially in the last, Arnold makes extensive use of extracts from vernacular newspapers. However, the notes reveal that these extracts all come from something called 'native news- paper reports' (NNR). Since his concern for Indian views is almost the hallmark of Arnold's scholarship, I would have liked to have a discussion of the provenance of these sources. Who compiled the 'native newspaper reports'? For whom? For what purpose? Do they preserve whole newspapers, or just clippings, or even just translations? If they are translations, who did them? What kind of bias are they likely to introduce? In a field of scholarship such as imperial medicine, where the imperial powers still have a near-total monopoly on the extant sources relating to the discipline, it would have been a great service to his colleagues if Arnold had gone beyond his treatment of rumours to discuss other alternative sources for the local side of the story, including the local sources he makes use of himself.

If Arnold has not exhausted his chosen subject matter in this book, he has certainly sketched out the shape of the field, and provided clear guidelines for future work. His admirable clarity of exposition and concern to account for change from the points of view of all the historical actors mean that his next contributions will be eagerly awaited by scholars of imperial history everywhere.

Mark Harrison's Public Health in British India is the revision of what was clearly a very good doctoral thesis. Where Arnold has chosen to concentrate on the relationship of the British state with its Indian subjects in the context of epidemic diseases, Harrison's net is cast wider in the sense that it takes all of public health as its subject, yet narrower in that the explicit focus is on 'Anglo-Indian preventive medicine'. Even so, the study repeatedly invokes the active involvement of the Indian population in restricting the effective scope of British medical intervention.

The introduction places the study in the context of existing scholarship, and neatly summarizes the scope and main findings of the work. These latter are that 'the dominance of indigenous elites in municipal administration from the I87os, and European fears of provoking the Indian masses after the mutiny/rebellion of 1857, were two of the most important factors shaping the development of sanitary policy in India.' Apart from the customary nod in the direction of the 'broader social and political significance' of the topic, I missed any attempt to woo the non-specialist reader into the book for the sake of any larger historiographic or theoretical cause-this is clearly a work aimed at professional historians of medicine with an interest in British India.

Nonetheless, there are highlights within this specialist work that will appeal to a much wider audience. After giving us an introduction to the Indian Medical Service or IMS in terms of its status, recruitment, and

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activities (chapter one), Harrison gives us a discussion of tropical hygiene in India which could profitably be set as required reading for students of the history of medicine (chapter two). The section on acclimatization is

particularly good, as is the important reminder that it was not only back-

ward-looking eccentrics who opposed the germ theory of disease causation in the late nineteenth century. I was surprised, however, to see no mention of social Darwinism in Harrison's account of how Europeans' greater sus-

ceptibility to fevers came to be explained in racial terms in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Chapter three, 'The foundations of public health in India', covers several

specific topics, all of which support the general conclusion that public health could have been more appropriately labelled 'army health'. In the section on 'vital statistics' (a topic conspicuously absent from its more obvious loca- tion in Arnold's Colonizing the Body), Harrison emphasizes that compulsory death registration-where this was successfully carried out-was primarily intended by the British as a means of obtaining information about

'unhealthy localities' and impending epidemic episodes for military reasons. Like smallpox vaccination, it provided a further means of 'knowing the

population' (p. I I3), evidence that Harrison has noticed this gap in Arnold's account of British colonization of the Indian population.

Under the heading of 'The civilising mission,' Harrison also includes the

dispensary movement and the extension of medical services to women, both of which serve to emphasize the very limited impact of western-style sanita- tion in India. Even in those cases where he would like to award praise for sanitary progress, Harrison's sources apparently allow him to go no further than to state-in the passive mood-that 'The presence of dispensaries in some cases apparently encouraged a desire for vaccination [... and were] thought an important factor in the adoption by Indians of western sanitary practices.' (Page 89.)

The pace quickens in chapter four, 'Cholera theory and sanitary policy', which focuses on the Indian government's opposition to the germ theory as an adequate explanation of the spread of cholera (mainly, it seems, because of the costly consequences acceptance of this theory might have on interna- tional trade), and how the officers in charge of India's sanitary policy were

eventually forced to capitulate to Robert Koch's findings. The chapter also

emphasizes the government's reluctance-often out of fear of violent opposi- tion to sanitary intervention-to assume responsibility for public health, a

responsibility which it devolved to poorly-financed local administrations in the i87os.

The theme of the Indian government's 'cleft stick' position is turther developed in the next chapter, 'Quarantine, pilgrimage and colonial trade', which considers responses to epidemic outbreaks of cholera and plague. In this chapter, Harrison uses Indian newspapers to particularly good effect, juxtaposing the Government line with the differing voices of Hindus and poor Muslim pilgrims who opposed any sanitary interventions lest these cost them extra time and expense en route, as well as Muslim community leaders who were anxious to support demands from the international community for stricter sanitary measures at Indian ports and on pilgrim ships. This

712 REVIEWS

chapter, more than any other, illustrates the complexity of the Indian gov- ernment's position in public health matters, and the conflicting interests which its officers were forced to balance. Small wonder, under these circum- stances, that inaction may sometimes have seemed the best response.

Chapter six returns to the subject of the western-trained medical men and their careers, highlighting how the intersection of colonial and professional medical interests promoted tropical medicine as a medical specialism in India complete with its own research institutes.

The next chapter sees the focus swinging back to the uneasy relationship between the central and local governments, and the consequences for sanita- tion. Local administrations had significant Indian representation after the Ripon reforms of 1882, and devoted significant proportions of their income to sanitation. However, a reluctance to anger their constituents with higher local taxation acted as a brake on new public health schemes. When the plague epidemic broke out in 1896, the critics of Lord Ripon's reforms used it as ammunition with which to attack the principles of local self-government. Spending on public health rose dramatically in the wake of the plague epi- demic, but Harrison shows that schemes such as Bombay's urban slum- clearance were prompted as much by the commercial incentive to open up congested areas to traffic as to prevent overcrowding or provide more sanit- ary habitation for the urban poor (pages I84-5).

In the last substantial chapter, Harrison concentrates on the local politics of sanitary provision in Calcutta from 1876 to I899, and it is this chapter which most convincingly backs up his conclusion to the effect that 'there was little scope for sanitary reform'. Harrison brings actors such as Dr William Simpson and Surendranath Banerjea to life in this section, and also accounts for the interests of the various sections of the Indian population. As a result his argument proceeds much more clearly than in previous sec- tions, where he has been handicapped by his own commendable commit- ment to documenting the huge spectrum of local variation, at the expense of analytical clarity.

The book's conclusion concedes to Ramasubban that there was not suffi- cient financial commitment from the Government of India to permit the kind of large-scale public health initiatives that might have benefitted the health of the Indian population significantly, but maintains that the resist- ance of the local Indian elites and tax-payers alike to such proposals was at least as important an inhibitor of sanitary improvement schemes.

On page i88 of Public Health in British India, Harrison mentions some Indian physicians' interest in I912 with such previously-neglected aspects of public health as food adulteration and the spread of tuberculosis. He notes that 'Unlike plague and cholera, tuberculosis did not cause sudden and extensive disruption of commerce and agriculture'. This comment high- lights the extent to which our accounts of the history of medicine in British India are still dominated by the interests of the British colonizers, and goes some way towards explaining the overlap in the subject matter of the two books reviewed here.

I estimate that between them, Harrison and Arnold have followed the history of western medicine in India about as far as is possible using the

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English-language sources available to them. The broad scope of Harrison's work and the rich insights of Arnold's are likely to provide the starting-point for much useful future work. Questions that came to me after reading their books were, for instance, to ask how western medicine (and not just epidemic disease control measures) interacted with other, better-established means of medical treatment. What was the potential market for western medicine

among Indians, and how, by whom, and to what extent was this market realized? What western drugs became important in home-based self- medication, for example, and what choices had Indian patients made in order to conclude that a visit to a western-trained physician was in order? What demand was there for the private, Indian-run schools of western medi- cine mentioned so tantalizingly by Arnold in his introduction? It might also be useful to problematize the amazing popularity of homeopathic medi- cine-another western import-in India, or to examine the ways in which western representations of the body and of disease were assimilated to

existing interpretative frameworks. For even today, western-medical ideas and therapies coexist with many alternative medical systems and beliefs. The most useful focus of future work in the history of imperial medicine is therefore likely to be on sources that better reveal the motives and concerns of local actors. Arnold's use of vernacular newspaper reports and local rumours represents a very welcome lead in this respect, and both books will be indispensable resources for historians of medicine in India for some time to come. University of Cambridge B. J. ANDREWS

An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines. Edited by ALFRED

W. McCoY. Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin- Madison: Madison, 1993. Pp. x, 541.

In this anthology Anarchy offamilies, editor Alfred W. McCoy makes four interrelated hypotheses: (i) family oligarchies are a significant factor in Phil-

ippine history, (2) it is the relations between these families that influence

Philippine politics, (3) elite family networks bring in factionalism into the

political arena and (4) 'interaction between powerful rent-seeking families and a correspondingly weak Philippine state has been synergistic' (p. I9). Lamentably, the essays in the volume fail to support hypotheses (i), (2) and (4). Actually, the various essays are really about individuals, not famil-

ies, and although the editor argues that 'the underlying paradigm is familial but the narrative focus is often individual' and that 'these essays describe individual actors operating within a familial context' (p. 24), the majority of the essays focus on an individual politician's use of armed violence in order to claim power and prominence and his failure to transfer this success to his heirs. John Sidel's study on Justiano Montano from its very title, 'failed dynasty building', shows Montano's abortive attempt to retain power for himself let alone entrench his family. Not Michael Cullinane on Ramon

Durano, nor G. Cartner Bentley on Mohammed Ali Dimaporo, nor Ruby Paredes on the Pardo de Taveras makes any conscious links between families

English-language sources available to them. The broad scope of Harrison's work and the rich insights of Arnold's are likely to provide the starting-point for much useful future work. Questions that came to me after reading their books were, for instance, to ask how western medicine (and not just epidemic disease control measures) interacted with other, better-established means of medical treatment. What was the potential market for western medicine

among Indians, and how, by whom, and to what extent was this market realized? What western drugs became important in home-based self- medication, for example, and what choices had Indian patients made in order to conclude that a visit to a western-trained physician was in order? What demand was there for the private, Indian-run schools of western medi- cine mentioned so tantalizingly by Arnold in his introduction? It might also be useful to problematize the amazing popularity of homeopathic medi- cine-another western import-in India, or to examine the ways in which western representations of the body and of disease were assimilated to

existing interpretative frameworks. For even today, western-medical ideas and therapies coexist with many alternative medical systems and beliefs. The most useful focus of future work in the history of imperial medicine is therefore likely to be on sources that better reveal the motives and concerns of local actors. Arnold's use of vernacular newspaper reports and local rumours represents a very welcome lead in this respect, and both books will be indispensable resources for historians of medicine in India for some time to come. University of Cambridge B. J. ANDREWS

An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines. Edited by ALFRED

W. McCoY. Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin- Madison: Madison, 1993. Pp. x, 541.

In this anthology Anarchy offamilies, editor Alfred W. McCoy makes four interrelated hypotheses: (i) family oligarchies are a significant factor in Phil-

ippine history, (2) it is the relations between these families that influence

Philippine politics, (3) elite family networks bring in factionalism into the

political arena and (4) 'interaction between powerful rent-seeking families and a correspondingly weak Philippine state has been synergistic' (p. I9). Lamentably, the essays in the volume fail to support hypotheses (i), (2) and (4). Actually, the various essays are really about individuals, not famil-

ies, and although the editor argues that 'the underlying paradigm is familial but the narrative focus is often individual' and that 'these essays describe individual actors operating within a familial context' (p. 24), the majority of the essays focus on an individual politician's use of armed violence in order to claim power and prominence and his failure to transfer this success to his heirs. John Sidel's study on Justiano Montano from its very title, 'failed dynasty building', shows Montano's abortive attempt to retain power for himself let alone entrench his family. Not Michael Cullinane on Ramon

Durano, nor G. Cartner Bentley on Mohammed Ali Dimaporo, nor Ruby Paredes on the Pardo de Taveras makes any conscious links between families

REVIEWS REVIEWS 714 714