Review

Author(s): Henry Selby

Review by: Henry Selby
Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 719-720
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/678371
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APPLIED

719

ing, the vibrant residue of its pell-mell, vertiginous 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 contradictions that structure the Mexican experience 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 urbanization after 1968, and his observations
began in 1970 in Neza (as it is called, for even
the locals cannot alwaysmanage 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, revolutionaries, 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 persistingmoral
vacuum.
This is a gutsy ethnography written by someone who has not just an excellent feel for the
Rituals of Marginality: Politics, Process, and situation, but a remarkable flair for writing
Culture Change in Central Urban Mexico, tangy English. If you want to know what it was
1969-1974. Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez. Berkeley: like on the urban frontier when Mexico was
University of California Press, 1983. xiv + 296 jumping with political activity, this is quite
simply the best book in English there is.
pp. $27.50 (cloth).
The mud, the stink, the sheer aggravation of
Henry Selby a city without services is movingly caught early
University of Texas, Austin in the book. Then out of the muck and social
chaos rises a hero: Arturo Valenzuela Cisneros,
If you drive out of Mexico City, heading who, supported by a gang of courageous and
southeast for Puebla on the eight-laned Avenida formidable women, take on the political estabZaragosa, you will pass an equestrian statue of lishment. The author is there, and the reportthe general, with raised sword (local joke: age is spare, sympathetic, and superb. The
"What is the hero of the battle of Puebla struggle is joined and reaches into the highest
saying?" "The subway is straight ahead!"), and levels of government and lowest levels of
shortly after you will encounter, on your left, a chicanery. There is a tragic ending. Valenzuela
city of between three and four million people wins (for his people win the securityof their tiny
called Ciudad Netzahualcoyotl. The city is the house lots, and the minimal services that can be
fourth largest in Mexico, but it is indistinguish- seen today), but he also loses, yielding to
able from the federal district next door, making repeated threats, attempts on his life, and is
it a part of the metropolitan area of the capital. abandoned by his friends, his compadres, and
The scale of this conurbation is quite stagger- even by the women. He suffers the ultimate
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 ElvinLewis ("The Antibiotic and Healing Potential of
Plants Used for Teeth Cleaning"), for instance,
provides us with a comprehensive cross-cultural
analysisof efficacious, and probably efficacious,
indigenous antibiotic dentifrices. Crest and Colgate have, apparently, much to learn from anthropologists.
Regretably, some of the papers are highly
technical, a few assuming advanced biochemistry training, so the volume cannot be recommended 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 Medicine is an ambitious and monumental work that
should lead medical anthropology in new directions in the coming years.

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720

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

humiliation: elevation to the National Congress.

Velez-Ibanez follows his career with an intelligent 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 byzantine 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 translation is mostly unconscious, little of importance
is lost.

[86, 1984]

This isn't a perfect book. Sometimes there are

attempts to gussy up the argument with some
theory from the inner spaces of social anthropology. 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 inescapable 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 relationship between symbol and experience,
Marcene Marcoux has given us a work that
reflects cultural anthropology's renewed appreciation of the concrete humanity we seek to
clarify through our investigations. Thus the
author notes that her interest is not just to explain the cursillo, a contemporary Catholic
revitalization movement, but to understand it
(p. 250). To this end she focuses with great sensitivity and restraint on the relationship between
human consciousness and human behavior;
both for the cursillistas she studied in Massachusetts, 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 movement 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 Catholicism, the cursillo comes into being as a model
for being Catholic, with its own particular emphasis 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 alterations in the norms or goals of their audience. . . . It is not so much the leaders' negation of the past, as their use of the past as a
catalyst that allows the desired changes to be attained" (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 symand ontology;
bols, affective experience,
language, experience, and being.
In chapter 4, "Conversion and the New Community," 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 potentially involves an ontological sense, where individuals realize who they are by encountering
themselves in an unparalleled fashion. . . . It is

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