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American Anthropological Association and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
American Anthropologist.
http://www.jstor.org
ReviewAuthor(s): Henry SelbyReview by: Henry SelbySource: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 719-720Published by: on behalf of theWiley American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/678371Accessed: 23-02-2016 06:26 UTC
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8/20/2019 Velez Ibañez Review
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APPLIED
719
logical symptoms,
which are
perceived
as
causes.
Marcia Elliott
Felker
("Ideology
and Order
in
the
Operating
Room")
compares
surgery
with
religious
communion.
The
comparison
(church/
hospital, priest/surgeon, altar/operating table,
cross/scalpel)
is
as
disturbing
as it is
powerful.
In
our
operate-first-and-ask-questions-later
culture,
an
indicator of
positive
social
change,
she
feels,
would
be an
overall decrease
in
surgical procedures.
A
few
papers
examine
the effectiveness of
non-Western medicinal
plants. Memory
Elvin-
Lewis
("The
Antibiotic
and
Healing
Potential of
Plants Used for Teeth
Cleaning"),
for
instance,
provides
us with a
comprehensive
cross-cultural
analysisof efficacious, and probablyefficacious,
indigenous
antibiotic
dentifrices.
Crest
and
Col-
gate
have,
apparently,
much
to
learn from
an-
thropologists.
Regretably,
some
of the
papers
are
highly
technical,
a
few
assuming
advanced
biochemis-
try
training,
so
the
volume
cannot
be recom-
mended for
a
general undergraduate
audience.
However,
this is
must
reading
for
all
medical
anthropologists,
physicians,
advanced medical
anthropology graduate
students,
and
advanced
medical
students.
The
Anthropology
of
Medi-
cine is an ambitious and monumental work that
should lead
medical
anthropology
in new
direc-
tions
in
the
coming
years.
Rituals
of
Marginality:
Politics, Process,
and
Culture
Change
in
Central Urban
Mexico,
1969-1974.
Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez.
Berkeley:
University
of California
Press,
1983.
xiv
+
296
pp.
$27.50
(cloth).
Henry
Selby
University
of
Texas,
Austin
If
you
drive
out
of
Mexico
City,
heading
southeast
for Puebla on the
eight-laned
Avenida
Zaragosa,
you
will
pass
an
equestrian
statue of
the
general,
with
raised sword
(local
joke:
"What is the
hero
of the battle of
Puebla
saying?"
"The
subway
is
straight
ahead "),
and
shortly
after
you
will
encounter,
on
your
left,
a
city
of
between
three
and four million
people
called Ciudad
Netzahualcoyotl.
The
city
is the
fourth
largest
in
Mexico,
but
it
is
indistinguish-
able from the federal district next
door,
making
it
a
part
of the
metropolitan
area
of
the
capital.
The scale of this
conurbation
is
quite stagger-
ing,
the vibrant residue of its
pell-mell,
ver-
tiginous
rush to house the millions that came
here to find their
own
lot
on
which
to build
their
houses and their lives.
If
living
in
contemporary
Mexico involves
a
time and cultural
warp
at
the best of
times,
then
CN
=
(M)2,
since all the most
warping
con-
tradictions
that structure the Mexican ex-
perience
are there
to
be
found,
and have been
studied
in
a
wonderful, warm,
full-blooded
book on the
place
by
anthropologist
Carlos
Velez-Ibanez.
He was
studying
Mexican
politics
and
ur-
banization after
1968,
and his
observations
began
in
1970
in
Neza
(as
it
is
called,
for
even
the locals cannot
always
manage
the
formidable
monicker of the
15th-century king
of
Texcoco)
and
spanned
the 1970s.
This was a
time of
rapid
change
and
political
ferment. At the
beginning
of the
decade,
middle- and
upper-class
apologists
successfully
promulgated
the notion
that
Neza was aswarm
with
all manner of
criminals,
deviants,
communists,
caciques,
dope
smokers,
glue
sniffers, radicals,
revolu-
tionaries,
and
political
subversives.
But
by
now
(and
Velez-Ibanez
notes
the
change
at the
end
of
his
period
of
study),
it
is
fast
becoming
a
haven of respectability, largely unnoticed by
"decent
people"
who continue
to wonder how
life
is
possible
in
the
putatively persisting
moral
vacuum.
This
is
a
gutsy
ethnography
written
by
some-
one who
has
not
just
an
excellent
feel
for the
situation,
but
a remarkable flair
for
writing
tangy English.
If
you
want to know what it was
like on the
urban frontier
when
Mexico
was
jumping
with
political
activity,
this
is
quite
simply
the
best book
in
English
there is.
The mud, the stink, the sheer aggravationof
a
city
without
services
is
movingly caught early
in
the book. Then
out of
the
muck and
social
chaos rises
a
hero: Arturo Valenzuela
Cisneros,
who,
supported
by
a
gang
of
courageous
and
formidable
women,
take on the
political
estab-
lishment.
The
author
is
there,
and the
report-
age
is
spare,
sympathetic,
and
superb.
The
struggle
is
joined
and
reaches
into the
highest
levels
of
government
and lowest levels of
chicanery.
There is a
tragic ending.
Valenzuela
wins
(for
his
people
win
the
security
of their
tiny
house lots, and the minimal servicesthat can be
seen
today),
but
he
also
loses,
yielding
to
repeated
threats,
attempts
on
his
life,
and is
abandoned
by
his
friends,
his
compadres,
and
even
by
the women. He suffers
the ultimate
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720
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
[86,
1984]
humiliation:
elevation to the National
Congress.
Velez-Ibanez follows
his
career
with an intelli-
gent
and
clinical
eye,
and
in so
doing
lays
bare
the
complexities
and
power
of the
Mexican
system
of
cooptation
in full
deployment.
There is a real art to this. Mexican
political
reality
does not
readily
translate into American
terms.
If
one
is literal about
it,
the
process
comes off
sounding
much too
exotic
and
byzan-
tine
and filled with
incomprehensible
rituals
and
transparent
struttings
and
phoniness.
The
author knows this
and so
translates
the
process
into
personal, populist,
reformist terms
that are
far
more
understandable,
and,
since
the
trans-
lation
is
mostly
unconscious,
little
of
importance
is
lost.
This
isn't
a
perfect
book.
Sometimes
there are
attempts
to
gussy up
the
argument
with some
theory
from the
inner
spaces
of
social
anthropol-
ogy.
One
can
quarrel
with the
title,
since it
will
mislead
anthropologists
looking
for a
study
of
rites de marge. But these are cavils. The book
presents
the
life, times,
and
struggles
of
people
engaged
in
the most
important
mass social
phenomenon
of
past
decades,
reminding
us,
as
we
constantly
need to
be
reminded,
that behind
such
analytical
terms
as
"migration,"
"labor
market
shifts," "social
reproduction,"
and the
like lies a
story
of
suffering
and
sickness,
broken
families and
fractured
lives
that
are the
in-
escapable
concomitants of
dependent capitalist
development.
Cultural/Ethnology
Cursillo:
Anatomy
of
a Movement.
Marcene
Marcoux.
New
York: Lambeth
Press,
1982.
viii
+
290
pp.
$14.95
(cloth).
Stan Wilk
Lycoming College
By
emphasizing
the
complex
and subtle
rela-
tionship
between
symbol
and
experience,
Marcene
Marcoux has
given
us
a work
that
reflects cultural
anthropology's
renewed
appre-
ciation
of
the concrete
humanity
we seek
to
clarify
through
our
investigations.
Thus the
author notes that her
interest
is
not
just
to
ex-
plain
the
cursillo,
a
contemporary
Catholic
revitalization
movement,
but to understand it
(p. 250). To this end she focuses with great sen-
sitivity
and restraint on the
relationship
between
human
consciousness
and
human
behavior;
both for the
cursillistas
she studied
in
Massa-
chusetts,
and
in
regard
to herself.
The
book is
divided
into two
parts.
Part
1,
"Description
of
the Cursillo" consists
of
four
chapters
that
give
the
history
and
contemporary
American structure
of
this
fascinating
move-
ment
that
began
in
Mallorca
during
the
World
War
II
period
and has
now
spread
to the
United
States
and
elsewhere,
claiming membership
of
well over a million
people.
Detailed discussion is
devoted
to
the
four-day
process
of
initiation as
well
as to
postinitiation
cursillista
life as
studied
through
fieldwork
by
the
author.
Part
2,
"Analysis
of the Movement" includes
an
interesting
chapter
on
"Catholicism
and Its
Discontents"
in which
Marcoux
observes
that
"through
its definitive discontents
with Cathol-
icism,
the cursillo comes
into
being
as
a
model
for
being
Catholic,
with its
own
particular
em-
phasis
on
community,
action,
and
piety" (p.
185).
The
most
interesting
chapter
is devoted to
"Charisma and
Tradition."
By
looking
at
charisma as
work,
she comes to see
that "the
successful leaders
not
only
catch
sight
of the
values, norms,
and
ethos of their
audience,
but
more
significantly,
their
message
reflects these
very
aspects" (p.
194).
Marcoux
goes
on to stress
that
charismatic
leaders
"generally
draft
altera-
tions
in
the norms or
goals
of
their audi-
ence.
.
.
. It is not
so
much
the
leaders'
nega-
tion of the past, as their use of the past as a
catalyst
that allows the desired
changes
to be at-
tained"
(p.
194).
The
concluding
chapter,
"The
Language
of a
Movement,"
is
an
appropriate
ending,
for
throughout
the
study
the
author
has
been
exploring
the
relationship
between
sym-
bols,
affective
experience,
and
ontology;
language,
experience,
and
being.
In
chapter
4,
"Conversion and the
New
Com-
munity,"
Marcoux observes that
"there is one
word
which
captures
what
happens
to
people
in
the cursillo:
experience.
. . . It is
not
so much
that
they
have
experiences,
but
that
they
are
the
experience
.
. . the
depth
of
experience poten-
tially
involves
an
ontological
sense,
where in-
dividuals realize
who
they
are
by
encountering
themselves
in an
unparalleled
fashion.
. . . It
is
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