Book Reviews 303 Shelter Blues: Homelessness and Sanity in a Boston Shelter. Robert R. Desjarlais. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.320 pp. JAMES M.WILCE, JR. Northern Arizona University What would a semiotically and linguistically motivated ethnography of mentally ill homeless people look like, given the problematic nature of taping their speech? A lot like Shelter Blues. If we seek alternatives to a rhetoric of clarity or to the mono- glot standard described by Silverstein in The Matrix of Language (Brenneis and Ma- caulay, eds. Westview Press, 1996), what better place to start than with the words of the mentally ill? Where could we find clearer examples of metapragmatic ascrip- tion and regimentation than those that dominate interaction in the shelter, where "residents" (or "guests") are either coerced into meeting a standard of referential clarity, or their words are charted and represented as evidence that their author's delusion state is exacerbated? Shelter Blues puts flesh on the bones of Foucaulf s call for studies of psychiatric institutions and their discursive exercise of power. The ethos of the shelter makes it a transparent locus for studying the ideology of language one meets in such other domains as assertiveness training sessions where persons must "own their feelings" with words—but here the ideology is literally enforced (see, for example, p. 198). If we take the ethnomethodological dictum that it is in violations that norms become most clearly visible (though the shelter's residents uphold as many norms as they violate), this ethnography effectively reveals U.S. culture and its particular Wittgensteinian language games (see especially Table 1, p. 210). Desjarlais is an important contributor to the emerging anthropology of subjectiv- ity. His approach to that enterprise ethnographically situates particular and variable subjectivities; it foregrounds "discursive practices more than it does a psychology of consciousness" (p. 244). Yet "discourse and sensation are forever intertwined" (p. 245), and thus Desjarlais advocates a phenomenological as well as a discourse-cen- tered approach to subjectivity. Subjectivities are, however, linked with political economies and with conflict The Boston shelter is a site of such conflict—a place where therapy, politics, and conflicting semiotics converge. Few take the semiotic (spatial as well as linguistic) constitution of competing forms of subjectivity (modes and "acts of experience") more seriously than does Desjarlais (see, for example, pp. 246-247). He introduces us to a mode of acting and speaking he dubs "inging"—even less goal oriented than phatic com- munion—and to a genre he calls "talking ragtime." Desjarlais asked Peter (the shelter resident who introduced him to this lexeme, which not only he but also fellow resident Richard used), "Whafs ragtime?" Peter responded, "Oh, ifs talk about the sky falling down or cows on the roof. It doesn't make any sense. How can you listen to that?" (p. 164). Yet listen is what the author did. Not only that, he documents "an ethic of listening" among the residents that invites comparison with Japanese aizuchi (Virginia LoCastro's chapter in Discourse Across Cultures, Larry Smith, ed. [Prentice-Hall, 1987]). In contrast with the staffs "ethic of understanding" (read: "ethic of semantico-referential transparency") this ethic of listening involved little analysis and much acceptance. At the same time, it is not hard for readers to sense with the author the thinly veiled culture criticism in the content (and perhaps form) of many residents' utterances and broader discursive strategies—for instance, in