Reviewed by: The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis by Sarah Pinto Sean M. Dowdy Sarah Pinto, The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 256 pp. Sarah Pinto's latest book, The Doctor and Mrs. A., is a soaring re-analysis of a psychoanalytic case study, a mere 40 pages lodged in an obscure text published in Lahore during India's Partition. Dev Satya Nand's The Objective Method of Dream Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (1947), though largely forgotten, argues for a regenerative process of transforming and reconceiving one's desires through their re-experience in dream states. As Pinto in turn argues, the experimental nature of the text, especially in its accidental ambulations and openness to new ways of living, affords a framework for theorizing the flipside of ethics, or what she dubs "counter-ethics"—i.e., departures from or reversals/reorganizations of ethical formulations. Pinto's entire book can be read as a fleshing-forth of this concept in its gendered, decolonial, and socio-cosmic implications—all the while keeping its defining contours fluid and open enough to do the work that counter-ethics is supposed to do. Being "indifferent to content…a position not a set of principles" (193), a counter-ethic responds to ethical claims with a modest, yet indomitable rejoinder: "Don't get too comfortable" (181). So, let's get a little uncomfortable and dive into the voices of a small and strange conversation once lost to the archives… The Doctor Dev Satya Nand was an Indian psychiatrist trained at the University of Edinburgh who later assumed psychoanalytic training under the supervision [End Page 163] of Owen Berkeley-Hill. While employed at the Punjabi Mental Hospital in the early 1940s he began work on his "objective method." Satya Nand's effort to re-work Freudian dream analysis—unscientific "mumbo-jumbo," in his words (89)—was meant to be both a correction and an elaboration. A correction in the sense that Satya Nand was trying to bypass the partial insights of free-association in order to impartially observe the rock-bottom truth of psychical reality. For the eponymous case re-analyzed by Pinto, the case of Mrs. A., Dr. Satya Nand had the analysand "promise to tell 'the whole truth and nothing but the truth' about whatever 'came into her mind during our investigations'" (7). This overhaul of Freud's "fundamental rule" in the incongruous language of legalist oath-taking removes the "free" from "association," but in doing so it—almost ironically, and perhaps counter to the intentions of Satya Nand—shifts analytic attention away from intrapsychic content and toward the dynamic forms of mutual interpretation. Thus, as an elaboration, elements of Satya Nand's approach were way ahead of their time. His technique for analyzing dreams (a day-dream in the case of Mrs. A.) was to parse and fragment "stories" of the analysand into "dream smudges," divide them up with elliptic gaps of silence (which he called "dream spaces"), then offer an interpretation with the intention of encouraging the analysand to reflect on the soundness of his interpretation as well as its unvoiced connections. Interpretation as an anti-authoritative offering, a proposal for the analysand to accept, refute, reinterpret, or fill in the blanks—this is a technical innovation most often attributed to D. W. Winnicott (1976), a quarter of a century later! And while Satya Nand's approach seems to avoid the transference/countertransference—i.e., the analytically essential, unconscious tango of projections, identifications, etc. stirred up between therapist and patient—his dialogical and narrativefocused technique is strikingly original enough to hold our attention. For Pinto, this technique became central to her conceptual development of counter-ethics. Mrs. A.'s "small arguments," her rebuttals and refutations of Satya Nand's interpretations, all demonstrate counter-ethics through "the choreographies of transformation, the forms taken by ethical imaginaries in their encounters with one another and with the world…often in moments when the terms of ethical formulations are revalued, or their meanings parsed" (27–28). Additionally, as Pinto historicizes in...

Reviewed by: Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture by Andrew Orta Eitan Wilf Andrew Orta. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp. Andrew Orta. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp. Making Global MBAs is an ethnography of the production of the managerial subjects of contemporary capitalism in elite business schools and MBA programs in the United States. The book is a welcome addition to the expanding anthropological literature on capitalism. Although it "draws on interviews and observations conducted between August 2006 and January 2017" (20), the book relies heavily on descriptions of events that took place prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Orta gives a short overview of some of the changes that business schools have instituted after the financial crisis, but it is worth noting for the sake of readers hoping to get an ethnographic sense of those changes that they are not reflected in the ethnography itself. Orta argues that "on the face of it, the timing of these events [i.e. the financial crisis] was not kind to this project" (20), but framed differently, the fact that his ethnography analyzes the culture of business schools prior to the financial crisis can be an advantage because some of the key insights that Orta makes about this culture—e.g., that it socializes students to reduce complexity, make quick decisions based on this reduced complexity, and take risks—can provide the basis for a productive discussion about the reasons for the crisis. The book highlights three key dimensions of the production of managerial subjects in business schools. First, MBA students learn to adapt themselves both to the normative ideals and practices of fast-paced business management, as well as to the demand for reducing complexity as the basis for making decisions under tight time constraints. Second, they are socialized to view international business through the prism of reified cultural differences that represent both challenges and potential rewards [End Page 789] for the cosmopolitan managerial subject who can manage across those differences. Lastly, they learn to make decisions and bear risk under the same conditions of uncertainty that they are likely to encounter outside of school as future managers. The book is divided into seven chapters. Following the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 provides a description of the pedagogical practices by means of which students are socialized into the fast-paced managerial life. MBA programs attempt to provide a boot camp-like intensity and learning environment in the course of which students undertake ritualized performances of quick decision-making based on reduced complexity. They cultivate "a communicative habitus" (32) by learning to prepare executive summaries of complicated situations and to present them as if they were giving a presentation to a board of directors or shareholders. They learn what Orta calls "a basic grammar of compression and commensuration" (35) by means of which diverse national business contexts can be compared along two-dimensional graphs and charts. Chapter 3 provides a historical context for the rise and expansion of business schools in the United States, whereas Chapter 4 provides a historical context for the rise and expansion of the culture concept in business studies. This concept became more prominent following the push toward international business in the 1980s, which created the demand for people who can manage across physical and cultural space. Visions of global standardization gave way to international business defined by local cultural differences that can have an economic impact both as challenges for business and as untapped value. The notion of the ideal manager who can balance "standardization with the nuances and niches of localization" (92) is anchored in this historical context. This act of balancing, however, requires "distillation" or reduction of entire cultures into commensurable and reified dimensions. Chapter 5 analyzes the short-term study abroad program that many business schools offer, which functions as a training ground for cultivating this type of ideal manager. Short-term study abroad programs provide students "an experiential 'executive summary' of frontier spaces of capitalist potential" and the opportunity...

Reviewed by: Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century by Michael M. J. Fischer Joseph Russo Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 464 pp. A seasoned academic once told me that anthropologists hate style. In retrospect, I understand this to have been a warning to stick to the well-trod paths of writing, method, and thinking laid out before the rightfully cautious student of anthropology, to carefully follow the frameworks of those who have come before, and to modestly add one's intellectual contributions to the top of the knowledge-pile. This well-curated collection of reworked essays by the prominent anthropologist and thinker Michael M. J. Fischer certainly proves otherwise—or, at least, that there are splendid exceptions, and I believe it arrives at a perfect moment. The marketplace of ideas which we call the academy in shorthand is, to say the least, a troubled space, and while much attention of the social sciences has been paid to dealing with larger, more abstracted and deferred macro-troubles, this work zooms in just enough to what Fischer calls the middle—that space in between the macro and micro observational modes of the ethnographer. While Fischer does not ever explicitly make mention of the situation of the academy (although he does provide us with wonderful examples of "extradepartmental networks and collaborative circles" [234] where he has found intellectual stimulation and respite), in which the scarcity of opportunity and the question of where to put ideas has become too pressing to ignore, his essays here implicitly provide a sense of orientation to another, reflexive middle. Here, the ethnographer herself is the fulcrum/mediator between the precarious [End Page 1655] academic structures enabling and restricting her work, and the precarious world in which she thinks and produces ideas. In this regard, the book is hopeful. One senses that Fischer has not only made a career of carving out his own conceptual niches, but that he has left a space through which others who stray from traditional forms of thinking and writing might follow. His capacious definition of ethnography as always-already experimentation yields both fruitful and limiting results (occasionally glossing over multimodal ethnographies or ethnographers working in the trenches of ethnographic writing as formal experimentation), but the work nevertheless maintains a productive line that brings one back to the spirit, above all, of ethnographic exploration as idea and method mining. The book also functions as a refresher with regard to Fischer's many contributions to the field of sociocultural anthropology, as well as a series of compelling historical anthropological snapshots. Fischer curates the structure of the book as a series of essays, which he refers to in the introduction as parergons (supplemental works thinking alongside of/through the middle of broader questions in anthropology, as well as alongside his many book-length works) in sections which are loosely conceptually related. He moves across ethnographic locations through homages to his peers and co-thinkers as well as critiques of aspects of Latour and Descola into the latter sections, which are more focused upon re-visitations of some of the core ideas he has developed over the course of his long career. He begins each section with a list of keywords and definitions that orient the reader toward his particularly creative usage of various terms and ideas. Fischer's efforts, in league with such other luminaries as George Marcus, Jean Jackson, Renato Rosaldo, and James Clifford, have provided us with seminal works, publications, and journals (such as Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Cultural Anthropology, and Writing Culture) that in the 1980s, opened up and continue to influence how we think about culture, ethnography, and the capacities of the ethnographer in engaging with what Fischer has coined "emergent forms of life." It is easy to forget just how canonical many of his and his peers' contributions are, and (as he reminds the reader) it is vital to be able to trace the histories of our concepts in order to evaluate how they stand in what Paul Rabinow (2007) calls "the contemporary." Fischer repeatedly...

From Tom Wolfe's "me generation" to the imputed digital narcissism of millennials, cultural critics have interpreted American neoliberalism as producing a crisis of hyper-individualism characterized by greed, selfishness, and a general incapacity to cooperate with others. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with an American intentional community, Oak Haven, to argue that, even as the notion of community is so often heralded as an antidote to the excesses of American individualism, understandings of community are themselves predicated on a powerful commitment to the individual. Rather than self-interested, competitive, or greedy, however, this individual is figured as a crucial component in healthy, ethical forms of being together. The form and promise of the individual thus made living collectively possible for community residents, who responded to the tantalizing promises and often acute challenges of living with others in communal proximity by intensifying calls for personal space and boundaries, on the one hand, and interior self-examination, on the other. Moreover, many Oak Haveners looked to another time and social order to imagine that "tribal" affinity could be achieved by bringing robustly volitional, independent persons into proximity, adhering to a theory of community that I call "assembly by aggregation." I conclude that this emphasis on individual independence and boundedness as a path to communal solidarity obscured how Oak Haven's most highly valued members were not those who were firmly encased, but those who were permeable to others—able to receive, respond to, and intuit the calls of others—even as this very permeability was cast as unhealthy and undesirable. Examining the dilemmas of (re)producing the individual in relation to idealized, pathologized, and actual forms of kinship at Oak Haven, this article attempts to illuminate how the unquestioned status of the individual in American late liberalism has significant effects on how collective flourishing can be lived and even imagined.

This article is about how digitalization has fostered a networked media environment enabling metamorphoses in popular politics. With the recent passing of two leaders of the Tamil nationalist movement, a half century of politics dominated by film stars and script writers leading Dravidian parties appears to be coming to an end in Tamil Nadu, India. Two recent political formations are especially worth focusing on in the new context: 1) Emergent leaderless forms of mobilization are reclaiming and reconfiguring nationalist idioms of populism, and 2) violent, dominant caste-based, anti-Dalit politics appear to be fragmenting the hegemony of Dravidianist politics at the very same moment. Despite the appearance of a paradoxical coincidence or contradiction, both caste politics and the new protests recall pasts that have been built through film and Dravidianist party imagery. This article examines logics of popular sovereignty where changing media technologies of image production have played a central role in "shortcircuiting" older claims to representation.

The competitive schedule of gouren, Breton wrestling, is divided into two seasons. During winter, the wrestlers compete in indoor sports halls, while in summer they wrestle en plein air, in outdoor sawdust arenas, confronting each other in a “traditional” contest called “Mod Kozh” (“old-fashioned”). The structure and the symbolic references of these two kinds of tournaments clearly differ. This article focuses on the different processes of cultural management of space and history carried out by wrestlers in each of these competitive patterns, in an apparently contradictory frame between modernity and tradition, globalization and localization. In fact, the winter indoor sports arenas can be described as kinds of “non-places,” impersonal and strictly operational. These settings are similar in every part of the world and represent the stages of many other modern sports—not only gouren. On the other hand, Mod Kozh tournaments take place in typical and recognizable settings, which clearly evoke the traditional features of gouren and immediately reflect the stereotypical representation of Breton culture and history. In such places, athletes immediately feel “at home.” In fact, Brittany’s landscape has represented their “natural” habitat since Breton wrestling was first practiced by their ancestors, the Celts. Nevertheless, Mod Kozh tournaments are actually a more recent re-invention than indoor competitions. This article describes how Breton wrestlers use the cultural representations of spaces and “landscapes” to define their activity, and themselves, as authentically Breton. In fact, these representations both enact and contribute to shaping Breton identity, even now that gouren has been transformed into a competitive modern sport.

Reviewed by: Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City by Rebecca Louise Carter Kaya Naomi Williams Rebecca Louise Carter, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 272 pp. In 1994, the City of New Orleans was the site of 424 murders: more than the city had ever seen in a single year, or has ever seen since. That same year, a Baptist church in Central City—a neighborhood that was and remains one of New Orleans' "hot spots" for homicide—rented a billboard at the corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard and South Claiborne Avenue displaying the message "THOU SHALT NOT KILL." The idea for the billboard, the pseudonymous Pastor Samuel tells anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, came as he was driving down the interstate to get to church one morning. Anyone who has lived in New Orleans in the lead-up to a local election can relate to Pastor Samuel's frustration at the bombardment of campaign billboards he faced on that drive. His decision to put up a different kind of billboard, and his congregation's ongoing support, changed the landscape of the city for three years until the church's contract was abruptly cancelled by the advertising agency, at which point congregation members began posting signs bearing the message throughout the city. When the Department of Sanitation removed all of the signs overnight, Pastor Samuel declared, "We'll be the signs" and began weekly public demonstrations to spread the Word of God. More than ten years later, the ongoing work of the congregation at this church—which Carter pseudonymizes as Liberty Street Baptist Church—serves to anchor her ethnography, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City. Based on research that began in 2007, less than two years after Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that claimed the lives and homes of so many New Orleans residents, Prayers for the People follows individuals across the city as they grapple with a resurgence of [End Page 563] violent crime amidst ongoing conditions of loss. The routes people took in that encounter, Carter writes, "frequently led to church" (17). The ethnography has breadth: Carter spends time with Catholics praying for peace at an Uptown shrine and with a white vodou practitioner in the Bywater who gathers neighbors to perform anti-crime ceremonies. She introduces readers to a church in the historically-Black Tremé neighborhood that posts a public list of every individual victim of murder in New Orleans in an effort to counter the broader public's selective interest in mourning only those victims deemed undeserving of their fate. The book's center of gravity, however, is Liberty Street: it is there that Carter witnessed most closely efforts at "a slow reframing of the moral architecture of the city" (18). An overabundance of scholarship exists that grapples with violent crime in U.S. cities: the vast majority of this work, which is produced from within the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, criminology, law, policy, economics, and history, to name just a few, identifies violent crime as a distinct problem and seeks to explore direct causes and solutions. This scholarship employs the homicide rate as a key measure of a city's relative health and targets poor and Black communities as the epicenter of the problem. Carter's remarkable ethnography suggests a need to reframe this moral architecture as well. The homicide rate appears in Prayers for the People not as a useful indicator but as a dehumanizing reduction. Violent crime itself is decentered and situated within a historical geography of violence, and poor and Black communities are understood not as the site of a problem but as the only places actively considering the collective moral and spiritual work necessary to even imagine a path towards change. Carter's ethnography is not primarily about homicide but rather about the faith-based practices of mourning and healing produced in its wake. This shift in attention unsettles the terrain of the scholarly conversation about urban violence—shaking the tenuous secular foundations on which it stands. Prayers for the People is a work of profound love and care...

Reviewed by: Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America ed. by Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard and Juan Javier Rivera Andía Piergiorgio Di Giminiani and Viviana Huiliñir-Curío Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard and Juan Javier Rivera Andía, eds., Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 282 pp. Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard and Juan Javier Rivera Andía, eds., Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 282 pp. The volume Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America, edited by Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard and Juan Javier Rivera Andía, is one of the latest works within the growing body of literature on extractivism and indigeneity in the region. Clearly written and yet rich in always surprising ethnographic material, this volume is essential reading for scholars and students interested in both Amerindian anthropology and political ecology in general. By examining how "indigenous life projects" are redefined through both negotiations and contestations with state and market actors, the nine contributions to this volume—set in Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Guyana, Venezuela, and Bolivia—make a strong case for the value of the ethnographic gaze in dealing with uncertainties and dilemmas emerging from natural resource extraction within indigenous territories. Thanks to its ethnographic commitment, this volume succeeds in highlighting the historically deep colonial features of contemporary practices of natural resource extraction in alignment with the interests of their interlocutors, without falling for essentialist and romantic representations of indigenous resistance to capitalism, as evidenced, for example, in Li's and Paredes's chapter on the strategic use of indigeneity in environmental activism in Peru and Bolivia. From a theoretical standpoint, this book is built around the ambitious project of bridging three streams of literature typically developed with little communication among them. With [End Page 267] different proportions, each chapter deals with materialistic questions of dispossession inspired by political ecology, debates on indigeneity and subject formation, and theoretical insights on world-making inspired by authors—such as Descola and Viveiros de Castro—typically associated with the so-called ontological turn. While this volume is certainly exemplary in attempting to bring together these three bodies of inquiry, in itself such an attempt is not a novelty. Nonetheless, it is truly refreshing in the ways in which the connection between these three bodies of questions and approaches allows authors to examine problematics, dilemmas, and controversies emerging from experiences of extractivism as they are conceptualized locally and contingently by indigenous actors. The volume's focus on the local articulation of extractivist problematics and controversies has several significant implications on the broader debate about natural resources in the region. Two implications, however, seem particularly relevant. Firstly, as this volume illustrates, indigenous experiences with extractivism cannot be reduced to a clash between novel exogenous modernist assumptions (sensu Latour) on natural resource extraction and ahistorical and consensual indigenous ideas about nonhuman agency. Rather, ideas about objectivation and ownership of natural resources deriving from specific industrial and Western approaches to human-environmental relations are necessarily made sense of and resignified under local ontological and political terms. In contrast with accusations of essentialism, an ontological attention to natural resource extraction revolves around uncertain knowledge concerning the nature of a particular being and its agency within contingent controversies on natural resource extraction and its questions. For instance, Andia's chapter set in the Peruvian highland focuses on the role of apparently non-indigenous artifacts, such as a Catholic church (Iglisya) imbricated in ownership controversies around mining areas, in informing mutual determinations between humans and their landscape; Kroijer's examination of the impact of the oil industry on the Secoya people of Ecuador shows how the dangerous effects of oil leakages are predicted and identified not through a characterization of oil as powerful non-human spirit, but rather through a consideration of the role of uncontrolled flows in eco-cosmological relations. Secondly, while many ontological principles of capitalism remain incommensurable with several indigenous notions of life, in extractivist contexts indigenous life projects are not necessarily carried out through political opposition to natural resource extraction. This volume draws attention [End Page 268] to the dilemmas that many indigenous people face in incorporating certain...

In his magnum opus, A Secular Age (2007), philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the process of secularization in the West has gradually and contingently replaced pre-modern "porous" selves, vulnerable to the cosmic and causal forces of an "enchanted" world, with modern "buffered" selves that assume a clear boundary between "the mind" and the outside "disenchanted" world. Rather than take Taylor's binary at face-value, this article queries which sensibilities, behaviors, and practices constitute buffered and porous selves in the current age of national security. More specifically, it examines the debates surrounding the implementation of the "Countering Violent Extremism" (CVE) program in Los Angeles, California, to probe how domestic policing apparatuses in the War on Terror construct and shape improper or racialized US Muslims as proper religious subjects. To discipline Muslim youth deemed susceptible to extremism, secular rule in the US counterterror state draws on, as well as amends, the discursive grammar of the secular to include the sensibility of resiliency, and its other, risk, from the psychiatric and psychological sciences. However, this secular sensibility has not only shaped the logics of counterterrorism, but has also come to inform pious US Muslim responses to policing interventions in their immigrant communities in LA, authorizing what they identify as the practices and virtues of a resilient Islamic subject. In this way, by exploring the intimacies between counterterrorism and the secular, and how these intimacies enable and disable certain forms of life in the current age of national security, this article argues that the styles of reasoning, values, and/or virtues belonging to distinctive traditions differentially articulate in what ways and for what purposes a proper subject must cultivate buffered and/or porous sensibilities.

Reviewed by: Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency by Andrew Lakoff Meike Wolf Andrew Lakoff, Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency. Oakland: California University Press, 2017. 240 pp. Among public health experts, it has become commonplace not to ask if a flu pandemic will strike, but rather when this will occur. Andrew Lakoff's book, Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency, outlines how this type of pandemic awareness—as both a rationale and a governmental tool—is by no means self-evident and is rooted in Cold War defense mobilization and planning. Today, while infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis remain some of the world's leading causes of death, especially in the Global South, few have gained as tremendous visibility in terms of biomedical, political, technological, and media attention as pandemic influenza. With its potentially high mortality rate and great mutagenic potential, pandemic influenza ranks among the most prominent infectious diseases. It is in this context that pandemic preparedness, in very general terms, might be understood as a modality of future-oriented emergency and resilience planning. As such, it has been implemented in countless plans and guidelines on a local, regional, and national scale. These plans and guidelines share a common underlying framework of a scenario depicted as event-like, sudden, disruptive to business continuity, and catastrophic. In this context, Lakoff's genealogical account portrays preparedness not as a destination to be reached, but rather as a continuous attempt to manage and survey potential disease threats transcending geographical, political, and disciplinary boundaries. As such, the book represents a welcome addition to recent accounts of global health security, infectious disease management, and disease prevention history. [End Page 993] Unprepared is structured in roughly six parts, and does not focus exclusively on pandemic influenza, but rather uses the US preparedness rationale as a framework to critically scrutinize strategic logic underlying current global health (security) approaches. The essay-like chapters cover a time span ranging from mid-1950s nuclear attack preparedness to the 2014 African Ebola outbreak, and a number of heterogeneous infectious diseases such as influenza, Zika virus, anthrax, or hemorrhagic fever—commonly classified as (re-)emerging diseases. Overall, Lakoff's aim was not to develop a comprehensive theory of security or to determine if and how international health officials might have failed in the management of past outbreaks. Instead, he uses a conceptual-historical analysis of officially publicized documents (expert speech acts, so to speak) to analyze the emergence of the global health security apparatus since the early 1990s. Occasionally, argumentative links between the chapters could have been stronger, as they sometimes resembled autonomous papers in scholarly journals. In his introduction, Lakoff provides links between his often heterogeneous and detailed material (ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Cold War to humanitarian biomedicine, surveillance networks, and Ebola). In particular, he asks what exactly constitutes an emergency—what do emerging diseases have in common? Why does emergency management matter—and to whom? These are valid questions, and the answers presented by Lakoff are indeed compelling. In his analysis, he portrays an increasingly interconnected world often met with both the political and biomedical assumption that infectious agents do not recognize borders, and that interconnectedness makes it necessary to develop rapid responses designed to provide security against emerging infections. When viewed from a global health perspective, some truism exists behind this assumption; however, many recent works in the social sciences have been particularly productive in highlighting the limits of this perspective, namely that borders are being very much recognized by politics, trade, and the pharmaceutical industry, and that current emergency management approaches—assumed to be global in nature—face a number of political and epistemological challenges. Lakoff's book fits well into this line of argumentation. In a thoughtfully constructed narrative, he demonstrates how emerging pathogens are transformed into security problems, and how these are embedded in assemblages of particular institutional arrangements, political positions, and [End Page 994] forms of professional expertise, rather than evoking a unified technical or political response. The historical emergence of preparedness (covered extensively in Chapters 1 and 2) is closely linked to the early years of the Cold War, when traditional...