434 Book reviews
literature on the social construction of kinship inSoutheast Asia. However, an opportunity has
perhaps been missed to examine critically
notions of ‘potency’, ‘power’, and ‘life force’ inthe region. Janowski suggests that it is the ability
to channel life force that is important in mattersof kinship, and it would be been useful if thisinsight had been developed further to explore‘power’ as a relational attribute rather than asubstantive force or energy.
Lee Wilson University of Cambridge

Rio, Knut Mikjel. The power of perspective:social ontology and agency on Ambrym,Vanuatu. xviii, 270 pp., maps, ﬁgs, illus.,
bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books,2007. £47.00 (cloth)
Ambrym has been an argumentative
anthropological arena since Deacon reported in
1927 that there existed in the island a six-section
system. Lanes, Guiart, Löfﬂer, Josselin de Jong,and Schefﬂer joined in heated discussions on thesystem. Patterson claims, however, that there isno such system on Ambrym, although her dataon kinship terminology are almost the same asthat of Deacon and her diagram of kinship terms
is almost the same as the model of terminology
proposed by Löfﬂer for the six-section.
Knut Mikjel Rio, following Patterson, alsodenies the existence of the prescribed allianceamong six groups, and yet presents almost thesame terminological diagram as that of Löfﬂer.
The latter is constructed on the basis of therestricted exchange supposed to occur among
three patrilineal terminological lines. The
marriage of a male ego is to be made with his
FMBSD=FFZSD=MBDD=FZDD. According to thediagram, two-thirds of marriages are within
the same generation and one-third between
adjacent generations. This diagram is inadequate
for the terminology of a six-section system,
because every marriage should be of anequivalent type in such a diagram, as Josselin deJong has pointed out.
I instead propose a new diagram, also
consisting of three patrilineal lines, which ﬁts therule that all marriages are to be made between
adjacent generations. Thus male Ego is to marry
his FMBSD=FFZSD, and Ego’s MBDD=FZDD is tomarry his FF or SS who are in the same categorywith Ego. I trust that this diagram is better thanthose that have preceded it.
Rio criticizes Radcliffe-Brownian British social
anthropology as seeing society as mere
observable networks of relationship. He

proposes a new approach by adopting Sartre’s
concepts: ‘third party’ and ‘totalization’. Sartre
claims that by paying attention to the third party
as a totalizer, the dialectical shifting ofperspectives among relations can be grasped.
Rio, following this idea, tries to analyse how thepeople create social orders and meanings
around themselves.
He ﬁrst searches for the third party in kinshiprelations and marriage practice. Rio’s argument
here is as follows: the marriage of a man’s MBS‘will eventually produce for him a new “mother”
who will be able to marry his son’ (p. 72). The
idea of producing a new mother is crucial in hisargument because he tries to grasp kinshiprelations as a production system. There are,however, some serious misunderstandings in hisarguments. He explains Ambrym kinship interms of actual genealogical relations. As it is,
the Ambrym system is based upon categories
indicated by kinship terminology. This kind ofconfusion between genealogy and category had
repeatedly been pointed out by Needham in
1960s. There is the fact that M, MBSD, and SW
are included in the category called rahen.
Translating rahen just as ‘mother’, therefore, is a
result of this kind of confusion. Another of Rio’s
misunderstandings is his assertion that amesong’s ZD ‘is carrying his blood, and istherefore an extension of himself’ (p. 77). Helimits the category mesong only to thegenealogical MB, who is interpreted as the thirdparty. Viewed from the categorical perspective,
however, her mesong also indicates her MBSS
and BDH. It is very unlikely that she carries theblood of these persons.
The latter part of this book covers ceremonies
of marriage, birth, circumcision, and death and
Rio analyses ceremonial exchanges in terms of
the shift of perspective. Rather than the usual
analysis of ceremonial exchange focusing on
economic aspects, he claims a new approach tothe anthropological theory of exchange. Looking
at pig-killing regarded as a counter-gift, heinsists that the counter-gift ‘destroys thecharacter of the previous gift and forces it into
being reciprocity’, meaning that ‘ego denies theperspective of the gift’ (p. 221) and makes the
new perspective of reciprocity. This is a strange
argument. Any anthropologist knows theethnographic fact that any kind of gift creates a
new cycle of reciprocity. A good example can betaken from North Raga (Pentecost, Vanuatu),
where gift, counter-gift, loan, and refund are all
related to each other and any of them can beregarded as an opening or a continuation ofreciprocity called mwemwearuana.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 405-454© Royal Anthropological Institute 2010

Book reviews 435
Rio’s intention to elucidate why a particularperson is selected from among many in thesame structural position may be admirable, but
one ﬁnds quite a few arbitrary interpretations
and afﬁrmations which are not veriﬁed by his
rather poor ethnographic data. It is regrettable
to conclude that ethnographically andtheoretically there are more confusions thancontributions in this book.
Masonori Yoshioka Kobe University

Medical and psychologicalanthropology
Davies, James. The making of psychotherapists:
an anthropological analysis. vi, 312 pp., table,ﬁg, bibliogr. London: Karnac, 2009. £29.99(paper)This book is an insightful study of the training of
psychoanalytic psychotherapists from ananthropological perspective. Through theanalysis of training institutes – sites ofknowledge transmission – and of the devices
they employ to prepare individuals to become
therapists, Davies shows that psychotherapeutic
training produces not simply practitioners but
agents of community maintenance andsupporters of a secular enterprise reminiscent ofpolitical and religious movements. Bourdieu’sconcepts of professional dispositions and habitus
theoretically orientate the analysis ofpsychotherapeutic socialization by way of which
institutions of afﬁrmation create professionals
who will transmit, sustain, and perpetuateorganizational values, practices, and tradition
over time.
This contemporary ethnography belongs to
the latest phase of the development of
psychotherapy in the United Kingdom in thetwentieth century, which began with theexpansion of psychotherapeutic inquiry,
continued with the proliferation of training
schools that accompanied its growth, and endedwith increasing challenges to psychotherapy inthe last quarter of the century. The descriptionof the rise and fall of the psychodynamic offers
an interesting overview of the historicaltrajectory of consolidation and fragmentation of
the ﬁeld of inquiry and practice. At the end of
the book, Davies returns to discuss thepredicament of psychotherapy, whose legitimacy
is challenged by external forces like academia,psychiatry, and new therapy schools, andcontested by internal forces that this study of
professional socialization exposes (afﬁrmationand dissent).
The ethnographic account consists of adetailed description of three core stages ofpsychotherapeutic training: the therapeutic
encounter, the seminar encounter, and clinicalsupervision. Entry into formal training ispreceded by individual therapy sessions, where
potential trainees familiarize themselves withnew spatial, temporal, and relational frames. A‘psychodynamic imagination’ – the beginning ofa new way of seeing the world – takes shape inindividual therapy sessions, which are also
instrumental in vetting candidates: thoseindividuals with positive experiences ofindividual therapy are more likely to decide toenter training institutes, making them favourably
disposed to their orthodoxy from the start.
The seminar encounter, afﬁrmative rather
than critical, revolves around the transmission ofa circumscribed and totalizing body of
specialized knowledge that discourages criticalthinking and legitimizes role asymmetries.
Trainees’ doubt or dissent is managed bypsychologizing criticisms, while simultaneously amythic world of organized inquiry that appeals
to shared concepts of personhood isconsolidated in seminar encounters. Such amythical world is further strengthened during
clinical supervision, where psychoanalyticalunderstandings of illness aetiologies areconstrued, and during which practitioners,guided by a principle of causality in theirinterventions, are endowed with the convictionthat they have something essential to offer toprospective clients.
The end result of this process of
psychotherapeutic socialization is the‘transformed practitioner’, an individual who hasacquired not only new clinical skills, but, more
importantly, new possibilities of self-knowledge
and identity along with the privilege ofmembership of an established healing
tradition.
If professional socialization instils a tacitsocial contract of conformity, it also leads to lowtolerance for individual transgression of
institutionally deﬁned norms and boundaries.
When transgression occurs and becomes
institutionalized, new training schools are born.
Afﬁrmative socialization then creates opposition,
which, when institutionalized, perpetuates
fragmentation and leads to consequent
expansion, leading the author to conclude that,paradoxically, afﬁrmative socialization can bereformative.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 405-454© Royal Anthropological Institute 2010