190 BOOK REVIEWS ways in which history is interpreted and utilized to construct an imagined diasporic identity. Matsuoka and Sorenson challenge us to refocus our discussion of the diaspora experi- ence, to view exile communities as existing simultaneously in multiple spaces, constructed and maintained through the affective power of memory and longing. Clearly for the Eritreans, Ethiopians, and Oromos living in the diaspora, an imagined community is intimately linked to the powerful and unifying symbol of homeland. And it is precisely because communal identity is envisioned in relationship to nostalgic memories of homeland that community should be under- stood to be moving and moveable, defined by discursive practices rather than by pre-established social structures or the fixed co-ordinates of a geographic space. This is where the authors ulti- mately fail to live up to their own challenge; it is precisely at this juncture between homeland and exile home that Ghosts and shadows falls short. While the experiences of these commu- nities clearly indicate a challenge to classical notions in early immigration studies of core and periphery, the authors tend to fall back on the idea that homeland, as defined by geo-political, rather than nostalgic disaporic imagined realities, is the presumed dominant core of cultural dis- course and activity shaping the ways in which the diaspora, still in their eyes the presumed periphery, is constructed. For the authors, it seems, exilic identity is informed solely by the socio-political realities of back home. Their ethnography, which thickly describes the history and politics of Ethiopia, all but ignores the actual lived experience of everyday life in Canada.The complex juxtapositions that inform everyday lives in the diaspora are left unexplored, provid- ing little insight into how these refugees orga- nize meaning and action in displacement, or how the complex juxtaposition of cultural forms that are shaped by the continuous and comprehen- sive interplay between here, there, and every- where play themselves out in the daily lives of the authors’ informants. Ghosts and shadows leaves us haunted by the past, but still wondering about the present. JoAnn D’Alisera University of Arkansas Moore,Henrietta L. & Todd Sanders (eds). Magical interpretations, material realities: moder- nity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa. xiii, 253 pp., illus., bibliogrs. London, New York: Routledge, 2001. £16.99 (paper) Magical interpretations helpfully consolidates the emergent analytic within anthropology of exam- ining African witchcraft through the context of modernity. With ten solid ethnographic chapters and an engaging introduction, the book provides the reader with many insights into the varied ways through which ‘the occult’ is an historically and morally significant domain of thought and practice for many Africans to interpret, resist, exploit, fear, ridicule, and manage pro- cesses engendered by particular configurations of modernity. Moore and Sanders locate this analytic within the anthropological tradition of trying to ‘make sense’ of African witchcraft. Although noting new theoretical, methodological, and topical approaches to the resurgence in the anthropol- ogy of African witchcraft since the late 1980s, the newer writers share an analytic with structural-functionalists of the 1950s and 1960s that explains ‘both the nature and the prevalence of witchcraft on changed relations of power, production and consumption’ (p. 9). The signifi- cant difference of the newer analytic is that witchcraft is viewed as not only shaped by but also constitutive of modernity in particular locales. This assumption highlights the varied cultural inflections of modernity, contributing to the term’s pluralization (‘multiple modernities’) and thereby signalling the dominant anthropo- logical project of destabilizing Western tele- ologies such as modernization or development through examining the lives of Others. Moore and Saunders note the danger of reinscribing the us/them dichotomy of such a project, but not every contributor is able to avoid it. Many chapters explore the theme of local responses to changes arising from modernity. Francis Nyamnjoh details key categories of personhood in the Bamenda Grassfields of Cameroon affecting development initiatives; cat- egories which he characterizes as the populist epistemological order that assumes the visible realm is shaped, in part, by actions in an in- visible realm. Susan Rasmussen also provides an analysis of indigenous terms of ritual power, in her case of the Tuareg of Niger. She insightfully examines changes in the content and uses of these terms, suggestively showing how they mutually inform alterations in social relationships and status within Tuareg communities due to economic and political changes arising from the state and global processes. Situating his discussion amongst the Ihanzu, Todd Sanders suggests the murkiness of the invisible realm provides suffi- cient ambiguity for these Africans to debate and discuss the morality of the market, increasingly important given the exacerbation of inequali- ties under structural adjustment in Tanzania. Jane Parish uses contrasting attitudes towards shrines and their talismans amongst Akan youth to look at some of the local debates over modernity and witchcraft. Richly documenting the multiple sources of material insecurity facing Sowetans, Adam Ashforth argues that the personal anxieties arising from witchcraft beliefs will constantly be fed by and feed the great economic and personal uncertainties of these South Africans. Misty Bastian’s detailed analysis of three sub-genres of the Nigerian popular press about magical modernity, situated in the changing political economy of urban areas and the nation, offers an