Anthropology Through a Double Lens. Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory. By Daniel Touro Linger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. 195, reference notes, index, ISBN 0-8122-3857-5)

Anthropologist Daniel Touro Linger begins his book with the observation that anthropology’s current focus on cultural analysis is relegating experienced lives to the margins of scrutiny. The “double lens” of his title refers to the necessity of realigning micro individual with macro inquiry. This challenge to anthropology’s predominant way of perceiving experience is overdue, as theoretical trends continue to dominate much of the research. Linger takes direct aim at the overwhelming use of abstractions inherent in the currently prevailing culturalist critique. In order to frame his analysis of the missing person in present day anthropology, Linger returns us to the chicken and egg dilemma in Durkheim’s classical sociology: does the individual control the social or does the social control the individual? He repeatedly refers back to Durkheim’s distinction between the two polarities in exploring how it is that the personal experience commands far less attention than the collective one in current anthropological study. It strikes me, however, as perplexing that Linger should establish this argument on a generalization that he describes as “standard social science.” As a sociologist I can confirm that not all sociology has been mired in this separation between the individual and social. From its inception sociology has offered diverse theories about “the individual”. Perhaps then Linger’s perspective says more about anthropology than the “social sciences,” for which he professes to speak. Linger makes use of Durkheim, as his straw man, but he does not repay Durkheim in kind by imparting the complexity of this sociologist’s work on the individual. Linger’s major site of analysis is how personal and public experiences combine to create areas of meaning. While this line of inquiry may be novel for anthropology, it is not for sociology as, for example, Dorothy Smith’s work amply demonstrates. Linger consistently holds up examples of sociology that haven’t explored this quarter, rather than those that have. These analytical incongruities represent just a few of the ways that this otherwise important work strays from the mark. Linger has organized his book into three sections: “Meanings”, “Politics”, and “Identities”. Each of these parts positions ethnographic work alongside theory in order to illuminate and vitalize the space between the individual and the social. In Part one, “Meanings”, Linger asserts that meaning-making occurs in the crosscurrents between personal and social worlds. In order to tap into the immediacies of this zone of experience, anthropologists, according to Linger, must scrutinize the ways that individuals interact with the social form. Accordingly, the first chapter seeks to establish an inside-out perspective for anthropology, in particular from the perspective of psychological anthropology. In this section Linger also expands this theoretical standpoint towards a more communicative and interactive approach. He promotes a micro-level reflective consciousness, all the while countering other cultural and interpretative approaches. He maintains, for example, that discourse overwrites the individual whereas communication engrosses both the social and the intra-psychic. The ethnologies developed by Linger to support and substantiate his case are vibrantly sculpted and engrossing. The first one begins with a query about the anthropological approach that “equates public representations with subjectivities” (50). This ethnography seeks to demonstrate how the identities of the Japanese Brazilians, who Linger has studied in Japan, were struggling to maintain their Japanese identities and ethnicity in the face of public and historic representations of Brazilian nationhood. Through his “spiders, not flies” analogy adapted from Geertz, Linger conveys to his reader the notion that people, not culture, weave the symbolic complexities and meanings in which we are enmeshed, and thus they evade being interpreted merely as text. Unfortunately, however, this insight is not what his ethnology demonstrates in …