Book and film reviews Affective states KESTING, MARIETTA. Affective images: post-apartheid documentary perspectives. xiv, 278 pp., illus., bibliogr. Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of New York, 2017. £67.75 (cloth) Anthropologists have been employing drawings and photographs to document their narratives since the beginning of the modern discipline in the late nineteenth century. I do not know what proportion of lecturers in anthropology have made photography and imagistic documentation a focus of their curriculum, but given the ubiquity of documentary images in ethnographic accounts, even by first-year university students, I believe the discipline would benefit from more dedicated attention to this domain. This is an important reason why books such as Affective images are most welcome in the current disciplinary environment of political and ethical contestation. Endless discussions of who has or has not the right or responsibility to photograph and make public what subjects in what ways for what purposes can overshadow the illustrative or discursive value of these images. Moreover, we all attend presentations and read texts where the ability to provide vivid, telling images and to describe incisively their meaning and effect does not fail to arouse admiration and sentiment or to provoke genuine thought. Marietta Kesting addresses the role of photography in the anthropology of social crisis directly by taking as her subject South African images of popular suffering and resistance. The period under analysis spans the pre-democratic struggle against apartheid, as well as the post-apartheid problems of African migration and refugee asylum, and the consequent irruption of economic and ethnic-nationalist conflict and violence. The opening chapter is admittedly daunting for those like me who are not fully conversant with the contemporary theorization on representation. Specialists in this field will no doubt find this discussion a bracingly fresh outlook on a thought-provoking panorama of new ideas. The rest of us will be relieved to discover that subsequent chapters feature case analyses based on empirical material written in a sophisticated but accessible style. The South African photojournalistic landscape is indeed dramatic and in some of these cases so iconic as to be familiar to readers who have no specialist interest in the country. How are these ‘viral’ images to be deconstructed and interpreted? Where do the imperatives of impression management, illustration, and representational ethics intersect? These are vital issues for teachers and students, who must move from naïve notions of ‘documentation’ to an informed analytical reflexivity when these striking, sometimes literally incendiary (cf. ‘the Burning Man’ photograph of 2008, p. 83), images are discussed. At stake here is visual literacy, a capacity now essential to the making, deployment, and discursive value of photography in contemporary ethnography. Kesting has done much in her circumspect, thoughtful account of South African images of social conflict, encompassing the human rights issues of economic abjection, political resistance, gender-based violence, immigration, national and ethnic identity, and the fomenting of attacks by the dispossessed upon the dispossessed. She is neither opinionated, strident, nor too eager to occupy a precarious moral high ground. Her Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 26, 872-918 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2020 Book and film reviews 895 of transnational heritage governance thus follows the shift in heritage management practices from their focus on preservation to prioritizing development. This change has been wrought by global leaders in economic development, such as the World Bank, NGOs, and transnational advocacy networks (TANs). In this milieu, cultural heritage represents an ideal resource for the new approaches to development, including the possibilities for sustainability, local participation, and capability-building. Heritage – especially at World Heritage Sites, which combine the facets of both conservation and branding – have come to be utilized as ways to promote global agendas such as climate change and human rights. In Lafrenz Samuels’s view, cultural heritage can be mobilized for social justice through creating egalitarian relationships, and the equitable distribution of heritage resources and benefits, as well as their burdens. Linking heritage rights and global justice, she briefly cites her fieldwork in Tunisia as a counterexample to her main argument. Here economic growth through heritage tourism ‘was marked by deepening economic inequality and diminishing opportunities, especially for the rapidly growing numbers of young people’ (p. 166). Tourism also has become a prime target for terrorist attacks. She then argues that ‘cultural heritage supports global justice through the process of articulating a global public reason around justice and human rights’ (p. 169). Mobilizing heritage reminds me of the recent expansion of anthropology research fields from working in small-scale societies to research at transnational or global levels. This poses serious challenges to sociocultural anthropology by blurring the boundaries with disciplines such as sociology, geography, or politics. Moreover, anthropological involvement in cultural heritage studies emphasizes this point further. Heritage studies require both a macro and micro approach, for ‘global heritage is usually defined through this international apparatus of conventions, treaty-based international law, and international organizations, most notably UNESCO’ (p. 9). As Lafrenz Samuels notes, some anthropologists, such as Lynn Meskell (A future in ruins, 2018), have produced ethnographic work on the business of the World Heritage Centre and the World Heritage Committee meetings besides ‘local’ sites. The strength of Mobilizing heritage is that it offers compelling discussions of the development of cultural heritage’s concepts and views, from being past-orientated and focused on material remains to the contested and dynamic dimensions of cultural heritage. The book could serve as a reader in university cultural heritage studies courses and could be used as a reference for other institutions dealing with heritage. It also offers a new perspective: that cultural heritage might serve as a tool to combat undemocratic practices and global injustices such as human rights abuses, inequality in access to resources, or exclusion. The book’s limitations may arise from the author’s optimism and unwavering belief in the power of Western democratic principles – with a typically American flavour – as the solutions for global ills in general and cultural heritage as a tool for mobilizing social change in particular. The problem is that Western democratic principles have not functioned well in many parts of the world, but Lafrenz Samuels does not deal with this fact. She therefore offers no alternative ideology or coherent strategies as to how cultural heritage might help solve actual global issues, but just discusses the possibilities and aspirations of what cultural heritage can do. Having said that, offering solutions is clearly not the book’s aim, so we are left to consider what we can do about it. KEIKO MIURA Waseda University PALMER, CATHERINE. Being and dwelling through tourism: an anthropological perspective. x, 174 pp., fig., bibliogr. London: Routledge, 2018. £115.00 (cloth) In the monograph Being and dwelling through tourism, Catherine Palmer offers us ‘a conversation about the relationship between anthropology and tourism’ that may reveal something about ‘the experience of being human’ (p. viii). The collocutor of the proposed exchange of ideas is not spelled out and, contrary to what some readers may expect, this book is not ethnographic in nature. It is more situated within the tradition of philosophical anthropology, with Martin Heidegger as the philosophical point of departure and Tim Ingold and Michael D. Jackson as the main anthropological sources of inspiration. ‘Being’ and ‘dwelling’ (as a way of being-in-the-world) are the two key analytical lenses through which the author proposes to look at tourism. In a certain sense, these concepts are opposed to the currently more fashionable notions of ‘becoming’ and ‘mobility’ developed in the tradition of motion philosophy, of which Gilles Deleuze is probably the most well-known contemporary exponent. Palmer rightly takes issue with certain assumptions of the so-called mobilities paradigm Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 26, 872-918 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2020 896 Book and film reviews and stresses the difference between movement and mobility (p. 136). Unfortunately, she does not engage with the burgeoning anthropology of mobility scholarship to strengthen her arguments. Despite the complexity of the subject matter, the book is very well written, and its structure is straightforward. The introductory chapter convincingly sets up the conceptual framework, whereas the last chapter acts both as a synthesis and as ‘a pause in the argument’ (p. 130). The remaining four chapters (‘Sensuous dwelling’, ‘Material dwelling’, ‘Architectural dwelling’, and ‘Earthly dwelling’) each zoom in on particular aspects of dwelling: the body and embodiment, objects, and the built environment along with the four interrelated elements of time, place, history, and memory. Each of these is illustrated through selected case studies, respectively walking and sightseeing (chap. 2); cultural heritage, particularly at Hever Castle in England (chap. 3); the airport (chap. 4); and the museum (chap. 5). The examples make it clear that the book’s emphasis is on culture and the cultural rather than nature and nature-based tourism. Critical readers may be annoyed by the heavy Western-centric (not to say Anglo-Saxon) focus when it comes to both the few real-life cases discussed and the theoretical frameworks used. Given that the author is clearly aware of the limitations of this choice (see pp. 5, 21, 126), one wonders why she did not expand her anthropological vision. Doing so would have allowed her to build exciting conceptual bridges with themes that have recently been explored by other anthropologists, such as post-humanism and alternative ontologies. Being and dwelling through tourism promises the reader ‘a wider, more holistic understanding of how the activity of tourism enables us individually and collectively to recognise, to know and to feel that we are human’ (p. 1). Regrettably, tourism as ‘a way of being alive’ (p. 142) is not clearly defined. What exactly makes tourism special and different from other forms of travel (e.g. pilgrimage) in terms of experiences of being and dwelling? Reading through the book, one gets a sense that the touristic activities taken into account and analysed are probably those with which the author-anthropologist herself is most familiar, namely those of the more educational and cultural type, whereby the encounter with ‘Other’ (read ‘unfamiliar’) people, things, and places plays a central role. This, of course, is not representative of tourism as a whole. Moreover, whereas tourism workers and ‘tourees’ (those visited by tourists) are mentioned in passing, the book remains firmly focused on the practices of tourists. Would it not be equally (if not more) interesting to reflect also on what the experiences of those working in tourism or those who are confronted with tourists on an almost daily basis reveal about ‘being human’? How does the fundamental cosmology of ‘the freedom to use tourism to make and remake the self through engagement with the lifeworld of others’ (p. 135) play out for the actors in tourism who are not tourists, but without whom tourism cannot exist? In sum, Palmer’s Being and dwelling through tourism offers the reader much philosophical food for thought. It may be a hard nut to crack for undergraduate students but is certainly worthwhile reading for graduate students and scholars in the social sciences and humanities with an interest in disentangling the role of contemporary tourism in ‘being’ and ‘dwelling’. As Palmer herself indicates, the book provides an attractive holistic framework that now needs to be tested on ‘other cultures and other ways of seeing, thinking and doing’ (p. 141). NOEL B. SALAZAR KU Leuven, Belgium ROOPNARINE, LOMARSH. The Indian Caribbean: migration and identity in the diaspora. 163 pp., tables, bibliogr. Jackson, Miss.: Univ. Press, 2018. £56.50 (cloth) In this book, Lomarsh Roopnarine provides a thought-provoking analysis of Indian Caribbean histories of migration and mobility. Expansive in scope, The Indian Caribbean includes archival and ethnographic data spanning the commencement of South Asian indentureship in the New World in 1838, to post-war migration, to migration within contemporary contexts in Europe and North America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The book’s originality lies in the author’s comprehensive documentation and analyses of migration statistics and oral histories that encompass multiple historical periods. Roopnarine discusses South Asian indentured labourers who took part in ‘reverse migration’ to the Indian subcontinent as well as the significance of intra-island/colony migration in the Caribbean region during colonial and post-independence eras. Focusing largely on the Anglophone Caribbean, but especially on Guyana and the Guyanese diaspora in Trinidad, Suriname, Barbados, and North America, Roopnarine also examines diasporic communities in the Francophone Caribbean, in the Netherlands, as well as the migration of non-indentured Indian nationals to the Caribbean within contemporary contexts. The author’s aim and contribution to Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 26, 872-918 © Royal Anthropological Institute 2020