SOCIAL HISTORIES OF FOOD Three elegant articles, devoted to ancient, medieval, and modern times, exemplify very different ways of treating the social history of food.

Twenty years ago, in Cooking, Cuisine and Class, Jack Goody trained his sights, those of a social anthropologist, on the conditions prerequisite for the emergence of differentiated cuisine—a high and a low cuisine—in societies and cultures. Sweeping boldly over Europe, Asia, and Africa, and traversing a period of time which extended from the fourth millennium B.C.E. in Egypt to two contemporary societies in northern Ghana, Goody could find space for only a few pages on ancient Rome; these may conveniently serve as my point of departure.

Irrigation systems were the first source of great abundance that stemmed from the Agricultural Revolution. They were also humanity's first great environmental curse. Long before issues of global warming and freshwater shortages haunted the modern world, irrigation systems blessed and bedeviled humans with their promise and peril. While a well-ordered functional irrigation system provided inhabitants with seed-to-yield ratios that were the envy of any dry-farming regime, these same irrigation systems could collapse in toto, bringing disaster on a scale never seen in rain-fed agricultural systems.

While most American academics and policymakers are familiar with the problems facing the growing elderly population in the United States, many are surprised to learn of the troubles confronting the aged in Africa. In stark contrast to the mythic image of the tightly-knit extended family, where grandparents are lovingly cared for as a respected and integral part of the family unit, is the unforgiving reality of hunger, ill health, and loneliness that is the daily existence for many elderly Africans. It is critical that the problems of the aged in Africa and other parts of the developing world be examined, but we must recognize that these problems do not signify a simple convergence toward a common social ill across the globe. Rather, the nature of inter-generational solidarity varies, sometimes dramatically, over time and across contexts. This study employs a comparative analysis to reveal important differences in the nature of inter-generational solidarity over time between two similar sub-regions in neighboring Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa, and asks what explains those differences.

Following Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), there has been considerable interest in studying gender images and engendered practices that emerged out of colonialism, both during the era of colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997; R. Lewis 1996; Stoler 1991; 1995; 2002), and subsequently (Altman 2001; Enloe 1993). Many of these studies have shown how colonized women were subject to the gendered and often sexualized gaze of Western men (Carrier 1998; Doy 1996; Grewal 1996; Yegenoglu 1998), and how colonized men were often regarded as either effeminate or “martial” by virtue of their birth into a particular group. Arguably, the latent ambiguity of regarding all colonized men as effete, and yet categorizing some colonized men as strong and aggressively virile, points to one of the many complex contradictions manifest in the cultural politics of colonialism. A similar point could be made with regard to nationalism, wherein women, and the image men want women to present of themselves, reflects masculine ambivalence about modernity (Chatterjee 1993). In any case, even when colonial discourse essentializes the virile masculinity of various subject groups—in particular the so-called martial castes of South Asia (Hopkins 1889; MacMunn 1977)—the putative masculinity of these groups is ascribed to breeding and latent “savagery,” and is rarely, if ever, conceived of as an achieved status, much less something an individual from some other group might achieve on the basis of training or practice.

Recent studies of trends in world income inequalities show that results differ significantly depending on whether income is measured through Purchasing Power Parities (PPP)- or exchange rate (FX)-based data. Korzeniewicz and Moran (1997), for example, relying on FX-based national income data, argue that world income inequalities rose during the 1980s. Firebaugh (1999), on the other hand, using PPP-based national income data, counters that world income inequalities declined through the same period. Both sets of authors subsequently have acknowledged and continued to debate the relative impact of PPP- and FX-based data in the assessment of world income inequalities (Firebaugh 2000; Korzeniewicz and Moran 2000).

When social ties are put to the test, proverbs affirm, those of consanguinity usually prevail: “Blood is thicker than water”; or as Arabs put it, “Blood is thicker than milk” (Lane 1893:1097). These enigmatic adages refer to former institutions of adoptive kinship in western Eurasia, contrasting the blood of natal kinship with the water of baptism or “spiritual kinship” in Christendom, and with infant fosterage or “milk kinship” in Islam. Other sayings, cited as epigraphs above, argue that the nurture of such adoptive kinship may match or supersede natal kinship, just as baptismal sponsorship was supposed to create a spiritual cognation superior to that of mere flesh and blood (Gudeman 1972; Guerreau-Jalabert 1995).

These three statements regarding personal ancestry were made to me by villagers during life history interviews I conducted a few months into my research in northeastern Madagascar. Each statement is an admission of slave ancestry, and I highlight them to introduce this paper for three reasons. First, such statements are not uncommon in these villages. Many villagers told stories of lost or stolen ancestors, forced labor for “nobles,” and slave ancestry. Second, much of the recent scholarship addressing slavery elsewhere in Madagascar has suggested that slavery is not easily discussed among contemporary residents of this Indian Ocean island. Thus, the fact that the people among whom I studied readily acknowledged their own slave descent by referring to their “lost” or “stolen” grandparents or to their own Makoa identity prompts further comparative inquiry. What factors explain acceptance of slave ancestry among some Malagasy and its concurrent stigmatization among others? Third, examination of variations in Madagascar's responses to slavery can lead us to new insights into the forms of identity and opportunity in other post-slave societies.

To review a volume such as this in this journal is a bit tricky. I am not an historian of the United States nor of its diplomatic history. Rather I am a pre-modern historian of Vietnam looking at a book on American legislative history that deals with Vietnam and our war in that country. I shall seek to examine it from a more Vietnamese point of view.

Dream Travelers is a collection of essays focusing on Western Pacific societies that weaves together new theoretical insights and richly detailed ethnographic analyses on dreams as travels. The result is a fascinating and impressively coherent volume. Recognizing that dreams in most societies are considered to represent actual travels of the human soul across temporal, spatial, and spiritual planes, the contributors take as their starting point questions about the social/political, cosmological/religious, and personal/psychological consequences of this assumption in eleven societies scattered across Melanesia, Aboriginal Australia, and Indonesia. Lohmann's introduction provides an informative historical overview of the social science literature on dreams, and then confronts methodological and epistemological problems that have long-stymied those whose interests in dreams are more cultural than psychoanalytical. These problems stem from the widely accepted notion that dreams are more problematic than other kinds of experiences because they are personal/private/internal and can only be made social/public through narrative. Dreams, so it goes, can only be known in a limited, biased, and filtered way. But, as Kracke reminds us in his Afterword, the inability to directly share experience or verify their content is not a unique feature of dreams, but extends to all sorts of social and cultural phenomena. More importantly for the volume's authors, these assumptions a bias in anthropological thinking about dreams as mere (often bizarre) imaginings of the individual, rather than as actual travel experiences that are fundamentally important to social, political, and religious life.

New York City's great importance has necessarily attracted exceptional scholarship, including recently a Pulitzer Prize-winning history as well as widely acclaimed studies of the city's physical and social dimensions. Viewed from virtually every angle, the great city's history might appear to have been pretty well exhausted. With the publication of David Scobey's Empire City, however, New York may have received its most innovative and important study to date. Viewing the city's mid-nineteenth century boom as a crucial point in its development, Scobey manages both to infuse familiar subjects with new meaning and to invest them with broad national consequence.

Dominant understandings of globalization, according to Gillian Hart, are “disabling.” By measuring the effect of the “global” on the “local,” conventional impact studies rely on a flawed conceptual opposition of time and space: the “global” is temporal and dynamic, the “local” spatial and static (12–13). This drives the lament, heard in post-apartheid government circles, that “there is no alternative” to the pro-globalization policies adopted when the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was displaced in June 1996 by a plan known as Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). “The central premise of GEAR was that an orthodox neoliberal package—tight fiscal austerity, monetary discipline, wage restraints, reducing corporate taxes, trade liberalization, and phasing out exchange controls—would lure investment . . . unleash rapid growth, tighten labor markets, and drive up wages” (20). A few years later, poverty had grown among the poorest and unemployment remained high.