Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. xv+272, $84.95, $23.95 pb; £57.00, £13.99 pb.
clearly set limits on the material she has collected, due to the ideologically controversial topics involved while discussing drunkenness, elopement and stealing women, and the ambivalences towards what could be considered rape. Half-told stories, suppressed feelings and ambivalent opinions towards the set of practices associated with ‘stealing ’ women before marriage are carefully considered in context. Chapter 6 is about marriage. The sharp counterpoint between the contents of a course on marriage run by Catholic nuns for the Sullk’atas and the ethnography on weddings and everyday life for married couples is very illuminating, as is the candidly described journey Van Vleet takes to understand the differences and significance of the goods received by the bride before entering the groom’s family household. The arrival of the new daughter-in-law into the domains of the husband’s mother is perhaps the relationship most intensively explored in its complexity, showing the process of creating and establishing relatedness in a context of unequal power relationships. This leads quite naturally to the last chapter about domestic violence. This difficult topic is dealt with in the context of the development of public policies addressing domestic violence as linked to a struggle for rights and resources. Van Vleet skilfully presents the tensions that using state resources to fight domestic violence may bring into the kinship networks and internal resources women have within the community to guarantee reciprocity in their everyday life. Common assumptions about domestic violence occurring mostly between couples are challenged, with evidence of violence between women (in-laws) and siblings. Van Vleet tries to surmount a few criticisms directed at Andean ethnography by bringing several important and relevant methodological issues to the attention of the reader ; however, they are not always thoroughly addressed or resolved. References to whiteness, racial dynamics, and how the presence of the ‘gringa ’ anthropologist may have influenced narratives and events are frequent, but insufficiently explored. There is evidence of a conscious effort to bridge the gap between cultural contextual analysis and the micro-analysis that sociolinguists offer of discourses and speech, but the results are uneven. The common criticism of Andean ethnography for not including the relationship between the communities and the national and global context is acknowledged, but again, the few times this relationship is brought up by the evidence, it is only modestly explored.