The network inside out.

Book Reviews adaptations to changes in the larger society reveal just how conscious and intentional their wielding of that power may be. Yet with each Brethren-building adaptation to modernity comes the seeds of potentially Brethren-destroying practice as well—what Reynolds calls kitchen traditions as sources of integration and disintegration (p. 110). Reynolds intro- duces us to Eliza, a recent graduate of a River Brethren school, who now works at home, baking for the local gro- cerette, also operated by River Brethren kin. This kitchen enterprise keeps her at home, something her mother dearly wanted, so she could help me. But Eliza is also working at another home-based occupation: tutoring learning-disabled children from her former school via computer. She has plans to expand this computer-in-the- kitchen enterprise: I'm starting the New Hope Learning Center and offering this program to the public, to students whose schools do not have a program to equip them .. . I'm doing this out of my house, too. Probably I'll give up the pie business if this does well... I can probably make from two students a month what I make with the pie business, [p. 115] What will happen when Eliza shifts from a foodways enter- prise to a technological one, even if she stays in the kitchen? In addition to Eliza, Reynolds introduces the reader to De- borah, who runs a home-based business supplying tourists 'Amish-type' meals, and to Nora who bakes goods and sells them at a weekly 'farmers' market (p. 109). These women, too, reveal through their words as well as their lives the impor- tance of women's work in cultural and boundary mainte- nance; the dilemma of women's work when it pulls them both toward—and away from—the families and communities they want so much to maintain; and the precarious balance of women's relationships to their husbands, men to whom they grant authority but men whose authority depends on women's willingness and women's work. Reynolds concludes, like many of us who have studied Old Orders, that the worldviews of such individuals are so vastly dissimilar . . . from that held by [those] in mass soci- ety (p. 165) that only the work of an honorable ethnogra- pher with articulate informants can begin to help us under- stand what the devil . .. they think they're up to, as Geertz so bluntly put it (1976:224). Reynolds's research goes a long way to answering Geertz's question about Old Order River Brethren women. Bronner's problematic presentation of Reynolds's work is clearly important for the ideas it en- genders, the issues it raises, the questions it answers, and the questions it implicitly asks. Even without analytical clarity, Plain Women: Gender and Ritual in the Old Order River Brethren offers us another welcome and worthwhile perspective. REFERENCES CITED Geertz, Clifford 1976 From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropo- logical Understanding. In Meaning in Anthropology. Keith Basso and Henry Selby, eds. P. 224. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. The Network Inside Out. Annelise Riles. Ann Arbor: Uni- versity of Michigan Press. 2000. 242 pp. BILL MAURER University of California, Irvine This immensely rewarding book is, on one level, an ethno- graphic account of the work of Fijian women delegates to the United Nation's Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. It is an ethnographic account of bu- reaucracy, nongovernmental organizations and transna- tional issue networks. On another level, however, it is a trenchant and thoroughgoing reassessment of dominant modes of explanation in anthropology and allied fields. While tracking women networkers who compile docu- ments, disseminate information, and extend their networks in international spaces, Annalise Riles also brings network- ing itself, and its attendant knowledge practices, to bear on the apparent exhaustion of paradigms that characterizes Turn of the Century anthropological analysis. If anthropology in the 1990s seemed paralyzed by the dis- cipline's internal squabbles over objectivity, partiality and perspective, it nonetheless trundled along discovering cul- tural logics behind social practices and deeper meanings in phenomena that, on the surface, appeared straightforward. Cultural analysis proceeded, as it had done for half a cen- tury or more, by revealing deeper or higher orders structur- ing everyday social and cultural phenomena—epistemolo- gies in winks, as Geertz had it. Yet there had been a nagging suspicion that the Durkheimian and Saussurean legacies that led anthropologists to deduce social and semantic proc- ess, on a different scale from on-the-ground practice, were inadequate to the worlds anthropologists increasingly at- tempted to describe, from globalization to international institutions, civil society, finance, law and science. This awareness arose not the least because the processes some an- thropologists were attempting to analyze resembled noth- ing so much as their own production of knowledge. It also came as globalization led some to query the logic of shifts in scale as an analytical device for gaining new knowledge about social phenomena (or, which comes first, levels of analysis or levels of reality, from local to global?). As Riles demonstrates, the issues here speak to the unexamined everydayness of social scientific reasoning, the distinction between description and explanation, and the very docu- ments and bureaucracies—field reports, tables, diagrams, funding agencies, academic institutions, governments, and nongovernmental organizations—that are the nuts and bolts of ethnographic practice today. Riles's main argument is that the artifacts, bureaucratic practices, and social worlds of Fijian networkers share a for- mal aesthetic with modernist academics. The analytical en- terprise of attempting to find a critical perspective on net- working fails. The networkers themselves are already engaged in and indeed have already produced such perspec- tives for their own purposes (i.e., maintaining the network) that would not differ in any substantive manner from what