277 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY Three Ethnographies of Escape via Pyramid Schemes David Stoll, Middlebury College Peter S. Cahn, Direct Sales and Direct Faith in Latin America. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 206 pp. Julie V. Chu, Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 360 pp. Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa After the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 216 pp. A nthropologists have long considered it our duty to explain and defend people who are culturally different from us. This agenda has not been treated kindly by the pace of capitalist transformation. Increasingly, we find ourselves in the position of studying, explaining, and defending peo- ple who want to be like us—or at least who want to run around in the same expensive gear that we do. Similar to ourselves, such folk do not wish to be captive to their own cultural traditions. Similar to ourselves, they regard their progenitors as old-fashioned. Worse, their model of improvement is usually the kind of mass consumerism pioneered by North America and Europe. They seem less interested in reproducing their cultural heritage than escaping it. They wish to join the festival of borrowing and splurg- ing which, via global warming, is cooking us off the planet. But they are less worried than we are because they have been captured by hopeful Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 1, p. 277-286, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2013 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.