Front and Back Covers,Volume 32, Number 1. February 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 1 Front cover Greece‐German relations The Prussian goose‐step survives in Greek official ceremonies as part of the ‘traditional’ display by the famed Evzones, or presidential guards – a relic of the German‐derived monarchy and its militaristic traditions. It is combined here with a male costume popular in the European parts of the Ottoman Empire, especially among Albanians and Greeks, and nowadays associated in popular imagination with the Greek War of Independence (1821–1833). German cultural influence still lingers in Greece, most visibly in the remnants of 19th‐century neoclassical architecture in Athens and other cities. The brutal Nazi occupation of Greece and Germany's role in Greece's current economic turmoil together represent another side of a tormented historical relationship between the two countries and their peoples. In an essay of which Part I appears in this issue, Michael Herzfeld argues that the mutual stereotyping by Greeks and Germans – a habit deeply rooted in these complex interactions – has become a major cause of Greece's difficulties, perpetuating its ‘crypto‐colonial’ status within the European Union. He suggests that the only possibility for escaping this destructive downward spiral is through a determined attempt to stop the stereotyping, and argues that anthropology could play an important role in that reversal of accumulated hurt and mutual distrust. Back cover FOOD POVERTY IN THE UK If, as Lévi‐Strauss suggested, food is bon à penser, how can an anthropologist interpret a lack of food in a highly developed society? Can an anthropological lens illuminate either the recent rise in food insecurity in the UK or the exponential growth of food banks? In this issue, Pat Caplan reflects on her current fieldwork on these topics in north London and west Wales. She focuses particularly on food banks, making use of interviews and participant observation with clients, trustees and volunteers, as well as local and national media reports. The author poses a series of questions: firstly, she considers who needs food aid and why, which involves a consideration of insecure employment and low wages, as well as changes to the benefit regime which have adversely impacted on food bank clients. Secondly, she discusses who provides food aid and how, by considering those giving to and running food banks and other types of organization, including their motivations for getting involved. Thirdly, she asks what kind of solution food aid offers to an apparently growing problem. Does this form of charity merely depoliticize the arguments? Finally and most importantly, she asks what this tells us about the society in which we live, about the state and its policies and the public discourse around such issues. She notes that there are many well‐honed anthropological concepts which can be brought to bear on these issues, including gifting and reciprocity, shame and stigma, entitlements and blame. Finally, a consideration of voluntarism raises important questions about rights and entitlement, including the state's compliance with the international covenants to which it has signed up.     

February 20th, 1907

A SINGER AND HER SONGS. ALMEIDA RIDDLE'S BOOK OF BALLADS. Edited by ROGER D. ABRAHAMS. Musical Editor, George Foss. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1970. Pp. 191. $8.50. Reviewed by Maud Karpeles.

THE STUDY OF GAMES. By E. AVEDON AND B. SUTTON-SMITH. Wiley (New York) 1971. Pp. 530. n.p. Reviewed by A. W. Smith.

FOLCLORUL. OBIECT, PRINCIPII, METOD?, CATEGORII. By GHEORGHE VRABIE. Editor: Roumanian Academy of Sciences. Bucharest, 1970. Pp. 327. Price: 32.-Lei. Reviewed by Béla Gunda.

OVAMBO PROVERBS WITH AFRICAN PARALLELS. By MATTI KUUSI. FF Communications No. 208. Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Helsinki, 1970. Pp. 356. Price 35.-mk. Reviewed by Bela Gunda.

STUDIES IN CHINESE FOLKLORE AND RELATED ESSAYS. By WOLFRAM EBERHARD. Indiana Research Center For the Language Sciences, Bloomington. Mouton and Co., The Hague, The Netherlands. (No price indicated). Reviewed by W. H. Hudspeth.

CLOUD-WALKING. By MARIE CAMPBELL. Indiana University Press. Bloomington and London, 1971. Reviewed by K. M. Briggs.

FRIEDRICH RANKE, KLEINERE SCHRIFTEN. Ed. by H. Rupp &; E. Studer. Bibliotheca Germanica. Bern (Francke Verlag) 1971. Pp. 444, 1 plate. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

KONTAKTE UND GRENZEN, PROBLEME DER VOLKS-, KULTER- UND SOZIALFORSCHUNG. Festschrift für Gerhard Heilfurth zum 60. Geburtstag. Ed. by his colleagues. Göttingen (Verlag Otto Schwartz &; Co.) 1969. Pp. xviii, 566. 81 photographs, 66 text illustrations, 1 map. Ellen Ettlinger.

A GAZETTEER OF BRITISH GHOSTS. By PETER UNDERWOOD. Souvenir Press. £2. Reviewed by Katharine M. Briggs.

THE EVIL EYE: THE ORIGINS &; PRACTICES OF SUPERSTITION. By F. T. ELWORTHY. With an Introduction by Louis S. Barron. Collier Books, 1970. Pp. 471. $2.95. Reviewed by Theo Brown.

SELECTED LEGENDS OF LEICESTERSHIRE. By SUSAN E. GREEN. Illustrations by Donald E. Green. Leicester Research Services. 1971. Pp. 39. 30p. Reviewed by Theo Brown.

WHAT WITCHES Do: THE MODERN COVEN REVEALED. BY STEWART FARRAR. Pp. 210, 22 photographs, 13 Text figs. Peter Davies Ltd., London, 1971. £2.50. Reviewed by C. A. Burland.

GAMLE NORSKE FOLKEVISER. By SOPHUS BUGGE. Norsk Folkeminnelags Skrifter no. 106. Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, 1971. Pp. 155. Reviewed by Jacqueline Simpson.

MEXICAN TALES and LEGENDS FROM LOS ALTOS. Introduction, classification, and notes by STANLEY L. ROBE. Folklore Studies 20. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1970. Pp. 578, 6 plates. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

VOLKSKULTUR UND GESCHICHTE, FESTGABE FÜR JOSEF DÜNNINGER ZUM 65. GEBURTSTAG. Edited by D. HARMENING, G. LUTZ, B. SCHEMMEL &; E. WIMMER. Berlin (Erich Schmidt Verlag) 1970. Pp. xix, 694. Plates 11, 3 text illustrations and 6 maps. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.     

Performing Buddhist Modernity: The Lumbini Festival, Tokyo 1925

This paper looks at the 1920s Tokyo transformation of hanamatsuri (the celebration of the Buddha's birthday) from a local observance to a mass public spectacle. The Lumbini Festival was a performance of Buddhist modernity orchestrated to promote links between Japan and Asia and present Japan as leader of Asia. The Lumbini Festival appeared in 1925, the same year as did the Young East , an English language journal published in Tokyo to promote the trans-Asian Buddhist fellowship. Neither was a state initiative, but both nevertheless contributed to the formation and naturalisation of links between Japan and its Asian neighbours and the development of the Japanese empire. The Lumbini festival naturalised Buddhist brotherhood in Tokyo; the Young East , by reporting it through Asia and the West, promoted ideas of their shared Buddhist heritage, and of a Buddhist basis for social reform and Asian modernity.     

Promised Land: Settlement Schemes in Kenya, 1962 to 2016

Smallholder settlement schemes have played a prominent role in Kenya's contested history of state-building, land politics, and electoral mobilization. This paper presents the first georeferenced dataset documenting scheme location, boundaries, and attributes of Kenya's 533 official settlement schemes, as well as the first systematic data on scheme creation since 1980. The data show that almost half of all government schemes were created after 1980, as official rural development rationales for state-sponsored settlement gave way to more explicitly welfarist and electoralist objectives. Even so, logics of state territorialization to fix ethnicized, partisan constituencies to state-defined territorial units pervade the history of scheme creation over the entire 1962–2016 period, as theorized in classic political geography works on state territorialization. While these “geopolitics” of regime construction are fueled by patronage politics, they also sustain practices of land allocation that affirm the moral and political legitimacy of grievance-backed claims for land. This fuels on-going contestation around political representation and acute, if socially-fragmented, demands for state-recognition of land rights. Our findings are consistent with recent political geography and interdisciplinary work on rural peoples' demands for state recognition of land rights and access to natural resources. Kenya's history of settlement scheme creation shows that even in the country's core agricultural districts, where the reach of formal state authority is undisputed, the territorial politics of power-consolidation and resource allocation continues to be shaped by social demands and pressures from below.     

Report on a Conference Devoted to Resource-Evaluation Methods (Moscow,February 1970)

Motor transport has not contributed to economic expansion in the Soviet Union to the extent seen in other industrialized countries. This paper investigates constraints in the USSR to the greater use of trucking during the 1980s: low road density and quality, insufficient trucks, a narrow variety of vehicles, inadequate repair facilities, and fuel shortages. These problems reflect in part the lack of incentives both for the trucking industry to satisfy demand for transport and for machine-builders to improve truck quality, limited investment in road construction, and the neglect of requirements for spare parts.