engaged with fieldwork material, and the open-ended way the papers were presented, all made the session particularly satisfying. Though I may have missed some papers that might have held a key, overall I did end up wondering whether the theme of the confer- ence was being properly addressed. At one point the issue of the history of landscape as a specific term within a particular moment in the Romantic Movement and European his- tory, that inaugurates a gaze, was raised. While some, such as John Harries, looked at the history of terms such as wilderness within a imperial context, overall there was not enough contextualization of such terms within the history of European social thought or, for that matter, within the colonial or postcolonial contexts in which we first encounter these places. Insufficient focus was given to the his- tory of these concepts within social and aca- demic discourses. The best panels were those where ethnogra- phies were presented. Interesting theoretical points and themes emerged from the panels on Movement, place and boundaries: Representations by and of Gypsies [trav- ellers] and Places and identities. In the latter session, three consecutive papers on Southeast Asia revealed a complex picture of place- making practices and how places themselves can also make people, thus emphasizing practice but also dissolving the ways in which places are being essentialized into abstract regional ideas. The panel on travellers addressed self-perceptions and also the wider networks in which traveller communities are enmeshed. It moved away from the isolation of any one particular groups practices to show how places are constructed in conjunction with, and sometimes against, other groups and organizations such as other villages, local authorities, governments and other traveller groups. That is, places are not made in power vacuums, but have many meanings coded within hierarchies. The ways in which people move through place, and how they define themselves, were also discussed. Our strength as anthropologists is that we work with and through people in particular places. Contesting of place is not restricted to transnational migrants or groups strongly iden- tified as marginalized. Yet when we think of the global context, can we say that any place belongs to any one people? In my own paper I looked at my experiences of the place where I was brought up as a Tamil in Sri Lanka, but realized belatedly that I had not focused on the actual city the Tamil community had found themselves in, where many different people and classes live with changing relationships to one another; I feel I ended participating in a romance of peoples and homelands. There is indeed a deep problem with conceiving of spa- tialities, but we have to go a little further in critiquing these conceptions than simply ignoring them by producing an empty space. Particular places are imagined, possessed and lived in relation to others. By the end of the conference I felt that place at times seemed indeed a little too metaphorical. Those who came out of Nigel Rapports final plenary spoke of their disappointment with a vision of a cosmopolis that did not acknowledge the contested, hierarchically and class differenti- ated cities we actually live and work in. It was a vision that excluded the non-cosmopolitans, those who are not in the position to imagine themselves as the travelling cosmopolitan class of anthropologists and would-be poets. Perhaps we have to return to the history of the maps we use a little more. Sharika Thiranagara University of Edinburgh sharikat@hotmail.com MAKING IT EXPLICIT: PRESENTATION AND REPRESENTATION OF NATIVE NORTH AMERICANS Huis van ChiLvre, Leuven, Belgium, 3-5 May 2004 This symposium about Native American studies was organized in celebration of the 25th anniversary the American Indian Workshop (AIW). European scholars working on and with Native American/First Nations have been meeting regularly for a quarter of a century now to present and discuss their research. Though it still retains the title work- shop, after 25 years this itinerant event, held this year in the exquisitely preserved 17th-cen- tury Begijnhof quarter in Leuven, has now reached the status of a genuine international conference. The public and participants could choose between three parallel sessions, each addressing different issues related to the theme Presentation and representation of Native Americans. Organizers Barbara Saunders and Lea Zuyderhoudt selected an interdisciplinary array of papers of exceptional quality and diversity as is evident from the collection Challenges of Native American Studies: Essays in celebration of the twenty-fifth American Indian Workshop (Leuven University Press, 2004), expeditiously edited by the organizers, and including many of the papers presented at the conference. No theme is more topical than that proposed by this conference, as Barbara Saunders force- fully reminded us during her opening speech. She made explicit reference to the heated debate about the term indigenous which has emerged in the pages of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY and other journals. She stressed the desirability of an academic anthropology actively engaged with the contemporary prob- lems of those people for whom claiming indigenous status for themselves is one of few means to draw attention to their marginal- ization in the context of global power imbal- ances. The presence of more than a dozen indige- nous conference participants forced European and Euro-American/Canadian scholars to reflect more seriously on their practical engagement with the ontological status of the term indigenous. The encounter confronted them with the incommensurate nature of prac- tical and academic idioms at the core of much of Native American studies a point also elo- quently stressed by Lea Zuyderhoudt in her introduction to the book. The debates that echoed in the beautiful halls of the Begijnhof also revealed how practitioners of this disci- pline are not always eager to bridge the episte- mological gap created by incompatible, often over-specialized, idioms. The interdisciplinary nature of contempo- rary Native American studies, evident from both conference and book, points to the indis- pensable continuous movement between the various disciplines that make up this field of academic investigation. As the lively discus- sions between indigenous and non-native par- ticipants (among both scholars and public) demonstrated, the requirement of intellectual agility also demands a practical engagement with North American indigenous peoples needs and desires. This practical involvement with concrete problems is the driving force of Native American studies today, a force that is slowly shaping scholarly fields of investiga- tion, directing them away from navel-gazing academic preoccupations and closer to real peoples concerns. A further challenge of Native American studies is that of avoiding slippages into far-fetched essentializing proj- ects along the lines of orientalism, as Barbara Saunders warned us in her opening speech. This warning resonates on a broader level with the concerns and practice of different disci- plines addressing other parts of the world, and indirectly points to the relevance of Native American studies as a testing ground for other area studies with a direct commitment to Native and indigenous peoples causes around the world. Many of these hotly debated themes emerged during the conferences three intense days. Nearly half of the material presented came from researchers working in Canada and the Arctic. Sessions ranged from memory and history to repatriation, the construction of ethnic identity through museums, and the his- tory of ethnography. Some papers dealt with problems of authenticity and racism; others considered blood quantum, education, and cul- tural resources management all very impor- tant topics that address contemporary issues, significant beyond the often somewhat parochial interests of an academic sub-disci- pline such as Native American studies. The several Native scholars attending the conference presented challenging and inter- esting papers. Lomayumtewa Ishii talked about Hopi concerns over representation of their history in local museums. Charlene Smoke presented Anishinabes issues with eth- nicity through photography, and Alfred Young Man reminded us of the pernicious diffusion of stereotyping Indian mascots among US col- leges and schools. Cherokee professor Delores Huff talked about racism in education, and Sharon Fortney addressed First Nations com- munity consultation in Vancouver museums educational exhibits. Ojibwa sisters Tamara and Jennifer Podemski contributed a touch of First Nations popular culture: Tamara showed a clip from an indigenous-run TV programme in which she features as a presenter (and pro- ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 20 NO 5, OCTOBER 2004 23