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The Eternal Storyteller: Oral Literature in Modern China . Edited by Vibeke Børdahl. Richmond: Curzon, 1999. xvi, 368 pp. £40.00.

Although trained in ethnographic field methods, she does not apply those skills in this study. She is aware of this and points out that the book is not an ethnography in the traditional sense: a detailed description of life in a localized setting. She only reports, for example, on two incidences she observed while in the field. The first arose when she was walking down a side street with her young daughter which she used to discuss the relationship between the government's birth control policy and the emerging market system. She does not comment upon what the Chinese people thought about these issues and events. All we have are her thoughts. Anagnost's book is rich in imagery; it is akin to reading a Roger Rosenblatt essay on cultural style: the focus is on the social phenotype, with the people's subjective realities derived more from the essayist's imagination than from the native's behavior or reflections. One problem with literary critiques is that it is never clear who is talking for whom. Is it the ordinary Chinese point of view, or the Chinese intellectuals evaluation of that point of view? Or is it Anagnost's reinterpretation of the Chinese intellectuals assessments of the typical Chinese attitude on a given topic? It is also not clear why Anagnost cites some authors while ignoring others. For example, Emile Beneveniste's theory of language is discussed, while Susan Brownell's book Training the Body for China (University of Chicago Press, 1995) which is supportive of some of Anagnost's observations on the relationship between the state policy, images of the body, and public representation is not. Her discussion of face positively notes Andy Kipnis's insightful work, while her discussion of unrestrained gambling in the People's Republic of China makes no mention of Ellen Oxfeld's Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong (Cornell University Press, 1993), which examined, among other things, how norms emerged to curtail impulsive gambling among southern Chinese living in Calcutta. For Anagnost, reality is found in the analytical critique more than in the ethnographic detail or scholarly comparison. As such, her book is representative of a literary genre more interested in the exploration of the intricacies of cultural interpretation than it is with understanding the ordinary worlds of everyday people.