Subjugated nomads: the Lambadas under the rule of the Nizams – By Bhangya Bhukya

Reviews 707 and Samoa (Mageo), and Indonesia (Hollan), we are presented with both detailed descriptions and often insightful analysis of the various problems and conundrums of dealing with others in a region in which they are widely held to be inscrutable – as Rumsey reminds us in his afterword. The acid test of any anthropological concept, however, is whether it can withstand an encounter with the ethnographic work that it inspires. Empathy, one feels reading this collection, is too ﬂimsy a notion to accommodate the excellent ethnographic work that the individual essayists have produced. In their introduction, Hollan and Throop lay down the claim that empathy is an inherent human capacity, elucidated by the discovery by neuroscience of so-called ‘mirror neurons’ which reproduce the perceived emotional states of others as if they were one’s own. With this as its premise, the volume rests on a series of irresolvable tensions. Geertz’s critique of anthropological pretensions to know and understand others from his essay ‘From the native’s point of view’ (Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 28, 1974, 26-45) casts a long shadow over this collection. The contributors are divided between those who agree with the editors that empathy is a universal human trait, and those who, with Geertz, are sensitive to the mediation of others’ experiences through public forms of symbolism. For those who agree that empathy is a positively identiﬁable feature of a universal human psyche (Mageo, Lohman, von Poser, in addition to Hollan and Throop), the attempt to understand others through careful interpretation is undermined: the dimensions of empathy are known in advance, and the analysis focuses on the variables affecting the precise social form a natural empathy takes. This positivistic perspective recalls Malinowski’s theories of kinship and human needs, in which complex cultural formations are constructed on the basis of simple, and in his case arbitrary, ‘laws’ of human behaviour. Other authors in the collection (most notably Lepowsky, but also Hermann) take a more nuanced and reﬂexive path. They contend that whatever we think we know of another’s emotional state, especially in unfamiliar cultural contexts, is always mediated by language. In these essays, empathy as such disintegrates into various particular indigenous representations of the care people of different cultural origins have for other people. Here the project recalls Malinowski in his guise as a naturalistic, Conrad-esque observer and storyteller. At the root of this division within the papers in the collection is exactly the same series of difﬁculties that derailed anthropological concepts of kinship and gender, reducing them to gestures indicating sites of apparent commonality, related only metaphorically or in the perception of anthropological observers. When gender was understood as a naturally occurring distinction amongst people, the problem for anthropologists was to map indigenous concepts onto their own vocabulary; the result was necessarily a loss of speciﬁc meaning. Once it was understood that ‘gender’ was a cultural concept proper to Western people, attention to the speciﬁc modes in which other people spoke about men and women led to the collapse of gender as a cross-cultural concept; the result was necessarily a loss of comparative power. Exactly the same challenges attend this volume. Once Hollan and Throop deﬁne empathy as a natural capacity of humans, culturally expressed in different forms, the project is in a sense already exhausted. The work of the anthropologist becomes a task of explaining away the oddities in which universal empathy is couched across the Paciﬁc, or of managing the chronic unease of attempting to speak of a putative (Western) ‘universal’ in terms of the incommensurable representations of others, which do not refer to it, and can be made to do so only through violence. Therefore, while it seems clear that empathy gestures to features of great signiﬁcance in Paciﬁc social life, like gender it is difﬁcult to deploy ethnographically. In this volume, the notion serves as a provocation for some challenging and excellent descriptive and interpretative work; whether the concept of empathy as the editors frame it can survive this encounter with ethnography remains to be seen. Will Rollason Brunel University Historical anthropology Bhukya, Bhangya. Subjugated nomads: the Lambadas under the rule of the Nizams. xxiii, 296 pp., maps, tables, illus., bibliogr. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2010. Rs 550.00 (cloth) This is a book by a historian that promises, in the introduction, to employ oral history methods to Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 690-729 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2012