questions about the nature of youth protest. De Boeck, drawing from his work in Zaire, challenges our understandings of "citizenship and nationhood, or conventional state-society and urban-rural oppo- sitions" (p. 76). Englund, whose essay stands out in this section, offers a convincing and elegant case study from his work in Malawi that reminds us of the need to contextualize our understandings of postcolonial societies. Likewise, Thornton plays with the language of "posts-" to offer his valuable take on South African politics. The second part, which includes contributions from Ogden, Fisiy and Ceschiere, Masquelier, and van Dijk and Pels, is entitled "Identity Degredation, Moral Knowledge, and Deconstruction." On the whole, this is the more ethnographic section of the book. Ogden's essay is an excellent exploration of "the continuities and discontinuities in the social constructions of womanhood in the shift from the colonial to the postcolonial eras" (p. 165) in Kam- pala, Fisiy and Ceschiere offer a useful contribution to the growing literature on the (re)emergence of witchcraft in African public discourses. Not only do they draw insightful connections between witch- craft and kinship in Cameroon, but they also con- tribute to discussions of state policy on traditional healers—an issue that is surfacing in many other Af- rican countries. Masquelier's essay on "competing definitions of 'true' Islam" gives us perspectives from different kinds of Muslims, and captures well "the process through which each party is able to re- define itself by constructing its opponent as the Other, an Other that lacks authenticity, legality, and worthiness" (p. 229). With a similar concern for tex- tual authority and the authenticity of experi- ence—in this case among Christian communi- ties—van Dijk and Pels talk about "text-book- knowledge" (p. 261) and spirituality. As van Dijk and Pels show, the two are not necessarily con- nected, as the "Born-Again" preachers in Blantyre, Malawi, pointed out to van Dijk during his field- work. As someone who works with Christian churches in Africa, I found this essay very engaging. It is a pathbreaking approach to issues of textual authority among Christian communities in post- colonial Africa and will, I hope, receive the atten- tion it deserves. Werbner and Ranger's volume is an excellent contribution to the growing body of literature on postcolonial Africa, not only for the ways in which it receives and reconfigures the language and de- bates of postcolonial studies, but also because of its substantive look at the lived-in world. The essays in this volume put a face on what is often the faceless theorization of the contemporary African scene. This volume should prove to have lasting influence among all those with an interest in postcolonial en- counters. The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death In the Amazon Jungle. PHILUPPE DESCOLA. Janet Lloyd, trans. New York: New Press, 1996. xii + 445 pp., illustrations, maps, glossaries, refer- ences, indexes. LYDIA NAKASHIMA DEGARROD Harvard University This book is an elegant, reflexive account of three years of fieldwork among the Achuar Indians of Ecuador. Descola wrote this text over a ten-year pe- riod, 16 years after the research was conducted, but presented his account in the present tense with the dual literary intents of evoking the freshness of the experience to the reader and of reminding himself of this experience. This literary device, however, does not veil the anachronistic foundations of this type of ethnographic research in which the objec- tive observer holds complete control over the repre- sentation and interpretation of "exotic" peoples. In a densely packed book of ethnological information, Descola skillfully manages to weave in ethnological reflections, humorous ethnographic situations, and implicit critiques of postmodern anthropology. Descola attempts in both form and content to re- create a lost period in ethnological writing. This is reflected not only in his mode of transportation to Ecuador (on a cargo ship) and in his ethnological notions, but also in the presentation of the text. Through his use of citations from 18th-century French explorers, philosophers, and ethnologists for the headings of the major sections of the book, and in his use of hand-drawn illustrations, Descola con- veys a longing for an era when explorers and eth- nologists encountered peoples untouched by West- ern civilization. Following literary techniques drawn from natu- ralistic fiction writing and earlier ethnographic ac- counts, Descola presents his fieldwork experience in the chronological order in which he learned the cultural ways of the Achuar and reflected on them a decade later. From prologue to epilogue, Descola presents his growth as an ethnologist from a doc- toral student of Claude Levi-Strauss in the Ama- zonian town of Puyo in the 1970s to the mature re- searcher in France in the 1990s. Descola's section on Puyo contrasts dramatically with the cultural rel- ativistic restraint exhibited later in his description of the Achuar. It is here that Descola shows a strong distaste for those he believes are not culturally pure. Puyo is a frontier town where mixed and opposed elements are combined: the mixture of Indians trad- ers, plantation owners, miners, and employees of multinational companies is characterized by Descola as anarchy and as lacking any kind of ur- banity, hybridity, and real past. The main bulk of the book comprises Descola's presentation of the Achuar, divided into three major sections: "Taming the Forest" deals primarily with issues of economy, "Matters of Affinity" with soci- ety, and "Visions" with religion. Each section is subdivided into chapters. Descola explains that this order is a way of chronologically following his pro- gression in his understanding of the Achuar. As Descola becomes more knowledgeable in the ways of the Achuar, he is able to get deeper into the cul- ture, finally reaching religion and thus entering the Achuar way of thinking. This separation of topics does not stop Descola from weaving into his narra- tive information pertaining to other aspects of Achuar life. For example, dreams permeate all the ethnological sections. reviews 63