1991 No. 1 CONTENTS - Institute of Social and Cultural ...

80 Book Reviews
continuing contact, allow her to take a moderately longitudinal view and prompt
her, for example, to seek some way around the essentially static nature of much
network analysis by introducing the idea of 'transitivity'. This is a gravitational
phenomenon, whereby denser areas of a network (Werbner's networks are mostly
of an informal leisure-based type, many of her male infonnants being selfemployed,
rather than factory-workers) tend to become more dense over time as
two parties linked by a mutual third forge their own link.
One of Werbner's main foci is the gifting phencmenon, lenlJ-deniJ, and other
aspects of the gift economy. Although her discussion is similar to Shaw's,
Werbner goes a step further by examining the intermeshing of (largely female)
gifting networks with (largely male) trading and business networks, both of which,
by being locked within the migrant economic enclave, tend to mutual reinforcement.
There is a semantically closed but dynamic cycle whereby mundane
commodities are transformed into gifts that, by their exchange, support valued
social relationships and enable businesses to prosper (through mutual aid societies
and informa1loans), thus indirectly generating further commodities. This I found
the most challenging and exciting aspect of the book: an ethnographically rooted
and original contribution to the debate on gifts and commodities; Werbner makes
use of, and then goes beyond, Gregory's Gifts and Commodities (1982).
The book certainly has much to commend it (for example, the critique of
positivist social geographers and their ideas of residential zoning on pp. 14-17) and
it is packed with information. My criticisms are minor: little or no discussion of
Pakistan or the Panjab, an absence of diacritics, and occasional irritating mistakes
with regard to South Asia (Gujarat State, in India, is apparently intended in a
reference on p. 91 (n.4) to 'Gujrat', a 'region' of India, when Gujrat is in fact a
district in the Panjab). The very density of the information, however, and a rather
awkward style, make it a difficult if rewarding read. I have already used A
Pakistani Community in Britain as an introductory ethnography for undergraduates
and shall be using The Migration Process for work on the economy with more
advanced students.
MARCUS BANKS
INGVAR SVANBERG, Kazak Refugees in Turkey: A Study of Cultural Persistence and
Social Change [Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Multiethnica Upsaliensis 8;
ser. ed. Harald Runblom], Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International 1989.
185 pp., Summary in Turkish, Bibliography, Tables, Maps, Illustrations. SEK 137.
We are accustomed to thinking of Turkey as a state whose heavy-handed policies
towards its own ethnic minorities generate a refugee problem rather than the
reverse. In fact, Ottoman and modem Turkey have had a long history of receiving