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108 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES the intellectual history of totalitarian ideology. His central thesis is that modern totalitarianism with its secret police, show trials, public confessions and executions treats dissent in the same way as the Inquisition criminalized thought and punished heresy. Further back still, Versluis indicts the early church for building a power structure on firm doctrines backed by the anti-heresiological rhetoric of Tertullian, Epiphanius and Irenaeus against the gnostics and other mystical currents. Versluis identifies several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political philosophers as the linkage between the Inquisition’s maintenance of doctrine for social order and the ravages of modern totalitarian regimes. Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortés upheld a Catholic theocracy as the best antidote to liberalism, individualism and modernity. The ideas of Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras further trace the transformation of Catholic social order into a closed political religion defined by its enemies: Jews, freemasons and Protestants. The Third Reich jurist Carl Schmitt sought a reunification of the mythic and spiritual with public life in German National Socialism. Significantly for Versluis’s thesis, Schmitt saw early modern esotericism (Rosicrucians, illuminates, pietists) as symptoms of fragmentation, while endorsing Tertullian’s attack upon the Gnostics. Later chapters consider the terror, criminality and mass murder of communist regimes; Norman Cohn’s thesis of the political construction of demonology as a strategy to annihilate the imagined sedition of witches, Jews and freemasons; and the conspiracy theories of late twentieth-century American evangelism. The practice of totalitarianism, theocracy and ‘ideocracy’ in various regimes across the Middle East and East Asia certainly challenges Versluis’s historical thesis that modern totalitarianism has its origins in Christian dogmatism, let alone a European institution. Nor is it true that the Inquisition acted as an agent of mass slaughter on the scale of Nazism, Stalinism and the Khmer Rouge. But Versluis’s work is a study not so much in history as in spirituality, as evidenced by his later sections discussing Berdyaev and Boehme’s views on the origins of evil. Versluis seeks to defend the dissident, the gnostic, mystic and theosopher against orthodoxy, while exposing the secular millenarianism and demonology that totalitarianism invokes to mobilize support. Versluis sees orthodoxy imposing its dogmas and staffed by an idea-serving class (‘ideocracy’) as a denial of spirituality and even transcendence. In this remarkable survey he has laid bare the dualist dynamic of political authority that seeks to suppress all dissent. University of Exeter NICHOLAS GOODRICK-CLARKE Empires, Nations, and Natives. Anthropology and State-Making. Edited by Benoît de l’Estoile, Federico Neiburg and Lygia Sigaud. Duke University Press. 2006. viii + 340pp. £15.95. Anthropology is an acutely contested discipline. Historically, it was popularly identified with the classification of human groups described by outsiders as in some way ‘primitive’. In the 1970s and 1980s it became commonplace to accuse its early to mid-twentieth-century practitioners of having been ‘handmaidens of colonialism’, serving the interests of colonial administration by building up a fund of knowledge about dependent peoples. In this reading of events, British, © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing. GENERAL 109 French, Portuguese and other European anthropological surveys became part of the colonial project, inextricably tied to empire because it was colonial penetration that made their research possible. Conversely, in the post-colonial, postcold war world, disgruntled governments and advocates of a purist, non-applied approach to social science have attacked politically engaged anthropologists, especially in Latin America, for their tendency to identify with the grievances of those that they study, typically the urban poor, peasant cultivators, or indigenous peoples threatened by the advance of industrial capitalism. More fundamentally still, some critics have questioned by what right anthropologists can claim either to define individuals or societies as ‘indigenous’ or to delimit the territorial boundaries and economic interests of a particular tribal or clan group. Not surprisingly, social anthropology, whether practised in a colonial setting or within the developing world, has rarely been seen as apolitical, impartial or scientifically ‘objective’. The very breadth and variety of accusations levelled against them drove numerous social and cultural anthropologists in Europe and beyond to reflect at length on the utility and purpose of their research. Their arguments are revisited in this collection of essays, a welcome addition to the growing volume of work that tackles the connections between colonialism and the social sciences. Whether working at the behest of colonial governments to map the ethnographic distribution of subject populations or, more recently, compiling data about the spoliation of cultures facing environmental devastation, all of the anthropologists studied here were ipso facto at the cutting edge of externally driven social change. The key question that this book addresses is the extent to which these academics and fieldworkers were merely observers of that change or catalysts of it. The answers provided vary temporally and regionally, ranging over the European colonial empires, modern-day Latin America and apartheid South Africa. It is hard to read these essays without sympathizing with anthropologists struggling to avoid excessive reliance on their sponsors and funding bodies, usually government agencies with a vested interest in the outcome of their research. In the colonial context, as Benoît de l’Estoile argues in a fascinating study of French anthropologists at work in francophone Africa, anthropologists walked a tightrope between providing information to colonial authorities and compromising their academic integrity as dispassionate social scientists. Here, as elsewhere, concern for the welfare native populations and eagerness to develop a more scientific, bureaucratic style of colonial government made for an uneasy alliance between colonial governments and anthropological fieldworkers from the 1930s onwards. But, as Omar Ribeiro Thomaz’s essay suggests, it was in Salazar’s Portugal that social anthropology was most clearly harnessed to the interests of an authoritarian and acutely exploitative colonial regime. It is difficult to do justice here to the originality of the chapters in this collection, but many of the most interesting essays tackle the extent to which anthropology has been used to help construct flattering images of national identity. Here we see anthropology as the close cousin of history and the construction of ‘usable pasts’. This intersection between national identity and national – even ‘nationalist’ – anthropology is explored in chapters covering individual regimes and governments (Salazarist Portugal, Vichy France, the wartime United States), as well as in others describing countries that have built up distinctively © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing. 110 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES national anthropologies of their own (Mexico, Brazil, post-apartheid South Africa, New Caledonia). The result is an indispensable survey of anthropology as, in some places, a tool of state power and, in others, a searing critic of its excesses. University of Exeter MARTIN THOMAS Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies. By Herman Lebovics. Duke University Press. 2006. xviii + 172pp. £13.95. Refracting colonial experiences onto the political and cultural development of imperialist nations is not an easy task, nor is it one that any historians have successfully attempted. Yet, as Herman Lebovics demonstrates in this collection of six of his previously published essays, working out the ways in which possession of an overseas empire transformed European societies from the seventeenth century onwards has strong contemporary resonance at a time when debates over supposed clashes between civilizations, the success or failure of multiculturalism, and the impact of globalization consume so much media attention. These are big questions, and they take an ambitious breadth of vision to address them. Yet the tragic irony that Lebovics addresses in this book is a simple one. Centuries of colonial domination did not open the eyes of imperialists to the cultural diversity of the peoples they governed, quite the reverse: imperialist nations typically imposed exclusionary forms of government and differential racial markers in order to entrench their own supremacy. The results were not only felt at the colonial periphery in terms of discriminatory economic systems, rights withheld, and freedoms denied. They were felt, too, within European societies where Lebovics insists, with good reason, that possession of empire poisoned the body politic. Here, too, we confront an obvious irony. The two most successful and determined of Europe’s imperial powers – Britain and France – were nations often held up as vanguards of liberality and democratic government. It is this paradox between democratic development at home and colonial oppression abroad that Lebovics explores. Lest this be read as far too abstract and imprecise, the essays in Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies address several distinct areas in which empire provoked some form of social, political or ethical degeneration in the societies of the European imperialist nations. One relates to authoritarian colonial administration and its corrosive effects on those who practised it in the field or defended it at home. The point is illustrated beautifully in an essay that compares George Orwell’s famous short story ‘Shooting an Elephant’, recounting his experience in the Burma police of the 1920s, with a lesser-known, derivative account by a post-war French district officer, Raymond Gauthereau, of a similar, but probably invented, elephant hunt. In each case, the compulsion to shoot the unfortunate animal derived from the pressure to conform to the archetypal colonial authority figure, in Orwell’s case unwillingly, in Gauthereau’s less so. From here the chapters move on to the worlds of art and academia. In discussions of the French filmmaker Jean Renoir and of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Lebovics demonstrates how liberal, egalitarian thinkers struggled to come to terms with European colonialism. Renoir ultimately despaired of French claims to republican universalism and colour-blindness. But Bourdieu, much of whose ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in colonial Algeria, © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.