766 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007 engagement with the topic, is the primary hallmark of this collection of work. Galloway’s approach to her primary ethnohistorical focus—the Muskogean tribes in the southeast, particularly the Choctaws—is informed by her background in French literature and language. According to her autobiographical notes in the introduction to the volume, her engagement with the ethnohistory of the southeast was prompted by her interest in the French texts of the history of the early contact period, which were numerous and that had been left largely unexamined. By analyzing these texts, as one would using the lenses of comparative literature, Galloway is able to gen- erate critical inquiry about the contexts in which the docu- ments were written and precisely what the texts represent. Turning this same critical eye toward the documents of the Soto expedition, Galloway penned the chapter “The Unexamined Habitus: Direct Historic Analogy and the Archaeology of the Text,” which emerges as the theoretical center for the rest of work included the volume. Galloway’s ease with the various iterations of Pierre Bourdieu’s formu- lation of the notion of “habitus,” as well as her own catholic interests and education, allow her to forge important con- nections among a variety of disciplines. She constructs a model for protohistoric interaction that is founded not only in the text-based disciplines of history and narrative studies but also in the cognitive sciences by incorporating interac- tion frames as rationales for action and rational motiva- tions for the behavior of individuals on both sides of the colonial exchange. In doing so she takes anthropologists working on the problems of the Soto route at that time to task for their na¨ ıvet´ e in their assumptions of the similarities between themselves and the 16th-century Spaniards and in their willingness to accept text as truth. Although much of the work on retracing the Soto expedition has been con- cluded at this point, including her own edited volume on the subject, Galloway’s article serves as a time capsule, crys- tallizing in that moment her analysis of and perspectives on the methods and process engaged to solve what seemed an almost intractable set of questions. The time capsule quality of the articles in Practicing Ethnohistory is at once part of its significance and also its only real drawback. The 21 chapters collected here can be seen as metadata on the evolving process of the practice of ethnohistory, an insider’s view to the development of the field. The articles were either previously presented but not published or more often published in volumes or jour- nals that are often difficult to access. Having these articles collected here in one volume is a boon to researchers, es- pecially those concerned with research pertaining to docu- ments and archaeology from Mississippi. Given Galloway’s prodigious and productive scholarship, however, it is pos- sible to find oneself expecting and desiring more recent work in which Galloway focuses on more current ethnohis- torical questions or reexamines her own findings in light of new evidence. This is, however, small criticism in light of the depth and breath of the work contained in the volume. Overall, Practicing Ethnohistory illustrates the breadth, depth, and varieties of research required to gain a com- plex understanding of the sparsely documented past of the southeast. By broadening, and at the same time specify- ing, the contexts for inquiry and interpretation of data, Galloway charts a course for ethnohistory that extends be- yond simply re-envisioning the past through the reexami- nation of documents and archaeological findings. Instead, she requires us to critically assess the processes at work during the colonial period, the lives at stake in every in- terchange, and the assumptions we bring to bear on our interpretation of this critical time frame. Ultimately, our awareness of the lives of contemporary southeastern peo- ples, their national sovereignties, and the lasting results of their adaptations to the tumult of the colonial process are dependent on works such as Galloway’s. Saving Languages: An Introduction to Language Revi- talization. Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 231 pp. JACQUELINE URLA University of Massachusetts, Amherst The predictions and causes of a vertiginous decline in the diversity of languages worldwide have received a good deal of popular and scholarly attention in the last decade. Lin- guists Lenore Grenoble and Lindsay Whaley already have edited one very fine book on this topic (Endangered Lan- guages [1998]). With this more recent publication, their aim is to not to document this decline but, rather, to provide a framework for counteracting it. They begin, however, on a sobering note: Most efforts to revitalize endangered lan- guages do not succeed. The book is intended as a general reference for scholars and practitioners interested in language revitalization, and while it is by no means a “how-to” manual, its contents re- flect this practical orientation. There are seven chapters in this slim, but at times dense, book. The first two chapters offer a general analytical framework for conceptualizing the processes and variables affecting language decline and revi- talization. Language activists I have worked with have often told me they longed for such a theoretical grounding. It is not so simple a task, however. As the authors show, part of what makes language revival so complex a form of social engineering is the dizzying array of variables that can poten- tially influence choices people make about what language to speak: from the attitudes and life conditions of speakers to the available material resources, national level politics, and policies on education, as well as the repercussions of other social movements. The authors do a fine job synthe- sizing and methodically mapping out this array of factors, clustering them into “macro” and “micro” variables. Subsequent chapters review the different educational models currently in use for teaching endangered languages: from total immersion schools, known to be the most effective, to “bilingual” programs, as well as the well- known “language nest” and “master-apprentice” programs