book reviews

that reflects the current state of Scandinavian folkloristics and ethnology while deepening anthropologists' understanding oi the politics of tradition.

479 with nature and the interconnectedness of all livingthings" (p. 9). Aromatherapy products, then, tap into a desire for a "fragrant eden" (p. 32) free of technological modernity. This explains why they are typically marketed as having been developed in partnership with primitive peoples from deep in the rainforest. Because macrobiotics links the faithful to a natural diet more in line with those predating the modern agrarian revolution, it emphasizes a 7:1 ratio of vegetable to animal products, seven being a number that supposedly reflects the natural human complement of teeth. And yoga and t'ai chi, especially as promoted to tourists in supposedly "natural" settings like Costa Rica, also promise a return to a more naturally integrated life. Lau admirably demonstrates how these movements, in exotic guises, reproduce dominant U.S. concerns. Aromatherapy, she argues, reflects a capitalist fragmentation oi the body into independent parts and thus separate product lines. Macrobiotics, she convincingly suggests, is a screen for the U.S. obsession with thinness. And U.S.-style yoga and t'ai chi do seem increasingly shorn of philosophical underpinnings, becoming modes oi low impact exercise in the quest for bodily perfection. Nowhere is this more apparent than in videos such as Buns oi Steel Power Yoga and Buns of Steel T'ai Chi. Nonetheless, I was not convinced oi the analytical utility of the notion oi "risk society" to explain these phenomena. Modern technologies have surely eliminated as many risks as they have createdthis would be especially true for the affluent who figure prominently in New Age movements. In fact, Lau's desire to identify the central anxiety underlying these practicesthe perception of danger to personal health posed by modernityseems out oi sync with the overall tone of the book. Lau is at her best when tracing the way New Age practices are inflected by complex and even contradictory discursive fields oi consumption, body type, and moralityfor example, yoga practitioners who simultaneously strive to be petite Japanese and leggy Jane Fondas. In fact, Lau seems to argue that much of the energy oi the New Age lies in its appeal to contradictory ideals; at the very least, this allows slippery marketers to work their magic on the largest possible number of consumers.

New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of

Eden. Kimberly Lau. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 178 pp., bibliography, notes, index.
JEFF SNODGRASS

Colorado State University In New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden, Kimberly Lau explores ironies accompanying the New Age movement's transition from counterculture to mainstream. Lau argues that the New Age, once associated with hippies and flower children, is now driven primarily by market forces and dominant cultural fantasiessuch as yoga studios that can gross $30,000 a week while selling a desire to be thin rather than enlightened. New Age alternative lifestyles, though still partly fueled by a desire to escape the U.S. obsession with wealth, are now neither truly alternative nor new. Rather, they reflect cosmetic retoolings of the United States' enduring romance with moneya "New Age Capitalism." In each oi the book's three central chapters Lau examines contradictions attending recent successes of the New Age movement, focusing on aromatherapy, macrobiotics, yoga, and t'ai chi. What does it mean, for instance, that aromatherapy products, though supposedly rooted in ancient Egyptian and Indian beliefs in the curative power of scent, are now commonly sold as bath and body sprays in shopping malls? Or, alternately, that Fortune 500 companies routinely hire yoga instructors to improve employee productivity? Lau explains these apparent contradictions with reference to the German sociologist Ulrich Beck's notion oi "risk society" {Risk Society, Sage Publications, 1992). According to Beck, the successes oi industrialization have spawned a proliferation of technologies and toxins that threaten human life and health. New Age practices, in classic orientalist fashion, promise an escape from these modern Western dangers by returning to an "imagined past existing prior to industrialization, a past epitomized by references to more integrated relationships

480 Anthropologists, however, will not be content to challenge Lau in her own terms by disputing the centrality oi risk or debating exactly which kinds of orientalist fantasies drive these movements. Lau's book is based entirely on textual analysis of promotional videos, yoga catalogues, advertisements, New Age magazines, news articles, and self-help videos. As a professor oi English, she is not a fieldworker and conducted no interviews for the book. If Lau were to have spent time with actual New Agers, for example, by centering around a local yoga center or health food store, she might have felt compelled to locate this movement's attractiveness in the power oi community rather than in clever marketing. I also wonder to what extent such local communitiesor at least those not so intent on selling themselves to the widest possible marketwould appear co-opted by dominant ideology. Also, I wonder why Lau's contact with New Age practitioners did not encourage her to move beyond fantasy or even ideology into deeper kinds of experience, commitment, or pain. She does not provide such deeper kinds of motivation or a sense of the different kinds of persons drawn to these movements. Finally, some may even ask if part of the appeal of these practices lies in the fact that they workthat they actually deliver on their claimed health benefits. In short, Lau's book has much to recommend it. She serves as an insightful and humorous guide through a bewildering array oi New Age discourses. The book is beautifully written, and Lau's arguments about the power oi discourse and ideology are demonstrated in her own descriptions. She is not averse to using her skill with words to summon the orientalist appeal oi these discourses. For example, she describes the manner in which the ancient Greeks drenched the wings of tame birds with perfume, allowing healing odors to spread as the birds flew about the room. Still, while acknowledging the ideological power oi New Age discourses, anthropologists will insist on complementing Lau's works with other kinds of studies grounded in fieldwork, psychology, and even physiology. Such additions, I might suggest, could lend Lau's work a health at least equal to that promised by all those clever New Age marketers.

american ethnologist UnstructuringChinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of "Land" in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Allen Chun. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publ ishers, 2000. xi + 348 pp., tables, map, bibliography, appendix, index. EVE DARIAN-SMITH University of California, Santa Barbara In Unstructuring Chinese Society Allen Chun offers an innovative, insightful, and highly sophisticated analysis of colonial practices and the significance they played and continue to play in constructing concepts of tradition, custom, society, and land in rural Hong Kong. The author engagingly notes that this work began as a rather conventional study oi the cultural dimensions oi kinship and social organization in a traditional, single lineage Hakka village of the northern New Territories. Chun's first-hand experiences in the field forced him to shed many of the methodological and theoretical assumptions that inform general anthropological understandings of socalled traditional Chinese culture. This shift in Chun's research agenda and aims came about as he increasingly grew to understand the meaning and role oi land as defined and regulated by a British colonial authority, and redefined and modified within local village contexts. "Land", writes Chun, is the common interface that reveals the essential differences between the regime oi colonial governmentality and traditional practices. Land has become the point of application not only for the colonial government's definition oi the village and the constituent community, but more importantly for the regulation oi local life in society as a whole, [pp. xiv-xv] While land operates as a source of economic and social survival, which is how many anthropologists analyze land use, Chun argues that anthropologists must view land in terms oi its secondary levels of symbolism and practice, as a "function oi community values (or lack oi them)" (p. 5). Chun details why anthropologists tend to reify what they perceive to be the nature of Chinese social organization by drawing on a wide range oi contemporary theoretical discussions, including literature on globalization, postcolonialism, and the complex relationship between anthropology and history. According