Caimari, Lila

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

542 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)— the relocation of Aboriginal people into villages — disrupted family life, sincemales now spent long periods of time trapping, fishing, or hunting away from thesenew settlements. Because subsistence items were no longer as readily available,Aboriginal families became much more dependent on a cash income. However,opportunities to earn money were limited in the new village settlements. (In fact,welfare payments, meagre though they were, came to be the predominant form ofcash income for many Aboriginal families.) With few employment opportunitiesand substandard housing and public services, these new settlements could best becharacterized as “village slums” (p. 252).Harsh though its assessments are (or perhaps because they are so harsh), C.C.F.Colonialism in Northern Saskatchewan merits careful attention from those whowish to learn more about the record of Tommy Douglas’s government and about theeconomic and social history of the northern half of the “Wheat Province” in thepost-1945 period.J. William BrennanUniversity of ReginaRUGGIERO, Kristin — Modernity in the Flesh: Medicine, Law, and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. 244.Modernity in the Flesh might be read as a succession of vignettes of Argentine soci-ety at the turn of the twentieth century — a period characterized by rapid materialprogress and massive European immigration. In the midst of the most vertiginousdemographic and material transformations, social and political elites witnessed(with mixed feelings) the results of their cherished project of modernization. Mainlyset in the city of Buenos Aires, where these phenomena revealed their most brilliantas well as their most unsettling implications, Modernity in the Flesh brings a newselection of topics to the better-known aspects of this process.In its meticulous eye for detail and its amused attention to the idiosyncrasies ofeach story, this book is reminiscent of Francis Korn’s recent “pointillist” reconstruc-tion of porteño life during the same period, Buenos Aires: Mundos Particulares. Itsscope and tone, however, could not be more distinct. Underlying this difference ofpitch are the authors’ divergent overall diagnoses of the qualities of the period.Whereas Korn, writing in the context of the current Argentine crisis, highlights theexceptional energy of this past in retrospective celebration of its messy optimism,Ruggiero focuses on the darker, less visible aspects of modernization, much in theway that Foucault’s critical insights on medical and technological modernity haveinspired other historical approaches to the dilemmas of mega-urbanization in otherWestern societies.This is a “history from crime” book. Ruggiero’s porteño universe is made up ofstories recovered from a rich collection of criminal cases, two or three of whichstructure the narrative of each chapter: wives “deposited” in institutions by suspi-cious husbands; domestic servants hiding the evidence of infanticides in the remoteHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 543corners of great mansions; cold-blooded murder plots to receive insurance benefits;“epidemies” of suicide across social barriers. Also recovered in minute detail are thebooks and articles on these (and other) cases, written by professional analysts andcommentators, as well as the many foreign and local authors who wrote about thethreats (and remedies) to society that worried so many at the time. Although thegreat diversity of particular topics and the case-based structure of the narrativesometimes blur the broader outlines of the picture, the book is more than an accumu-lative narrative of the dark side of modern Buenos Aires.The thread connecting all these issues, Ruggiero argues, is their common, obses-sive concern with flesh. As the disturbing, messy, unpredictable locus of modernity’scontradictory impulses, flesh (rather than the body, that well-travelled Foucauldianconcept) was at the centre of state efforts to control what were perceived (thanks to thenew, medically inspired concepts of social thought) as the great threats to modernsociety. To make her case, Ruggiero dwells in the most gruesome, morbidly funnydetails her sources provide, at times mirroring the naturalist prose of her informants.It is a deliberate narrative option, since those details tell us better about the singularlythreatening texture of flesh and about the anxieties it unleashed: fears of degenera-tion, of excessive outbursts of passion, of women’s sexual independence and adultery,of moral contagion, of uncivilized spills of bodily fluids, of physical and mental decayof the “race”. Indeed, the selection of topics that results from the “flesh thread” willnot be substantially unfamiliar to those who know the literature of Foucauldian (or, insome cases, gender studies) approaches to law, medicine, and society in this period.Neither will be the most general underlying assumptions: that medical science servedthe modern liberal state in its least liberal undertakings, such as the control of racially/socially suspicious populations or the defence of traditional gender and social hierar-chies. One of the most interesting contributions of the book is its discussion of the ten-sions produced by the consensus surrounding the role of honour as a key social value.Such a widespread cultural feature guaranteed the survival and tolerance of spaces ofprivate justice despite the configuration of the modern legal system, and it explainsthe successful call to mitigate punishment even for the most egregious crimes.Thanks to Ruggiero’s sensitive reading of the cases, her analysis of the problemsthey raise is never simplistic. Carefully selected from a wide range of originalsources to expose the richer aspects of the issues she attempts to highlight, each caseis matched with other documents, many of which are brought for the first time to thediscussion of these issues. Not only do they amply illustrate the dense texture ofmedical concepts and rhetoric used to analyse porteño society in the 1900s, theyalso provide valuable insights into the uncertainties raised by the need to define theconcrete institutional consequences of this prestigious knowledge, as it was appliedto the definition and administration of social control and punishment. Thus we findout that fingerprinting could be internationally celebrated as a major Argentine con-tribution to the state’s struggle to identify recidivists, and yet be dismissed by policechiefs, judges, and lawyers as an intolerable stigmatization of their subjects’ honour.More interestingly still, we see some of the most popular theories of the era — suchas Morel’s degeneration principle or Lombroso’s atavistic notions — widely cited inlegal courts, and yet often rejected by judges, who were reluctant to accept them in544 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale – Social History, vol. XXXVIII, no 76 (novembre-November 2005)the context of an argument for an individual’s irresponsibility before the law. Awhole new path of research seems to open up when we find out how much tensionthere was between the judicial authorities in charge of these cases and the “star”teams of medical and psychiatrist experts called to the courts for technical advice. Inthe end, the marriage between law and medicine was just as intense and troubled asmany of the cases of crime and passion recalled for us in this fine book.Lila CaimariUniversidad de San AndrésBuenos AiresRUTHERDALE, Robert — Hometown Horizons: Local Responses to Canada’s GreatWar. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Pp. xxiv, 331.One of the hallmarks of Canada’s “Colony to Nation” narrative is the belief that theFirst World War marked a turning point in the country’s national development. TheCanadian Corps’ battlefield success, we are told, prompted the soldiers atop VimyRidge to jettison their British identity in favour of a Canadian one. At the sametime, the Canadian government shed its own colonial attitude and demanded greaterindependence. The result was a Canadian signature on the Treaty of Versailles andfull autonomy under the Statute of Westminster. Yet, however accurate or desirablean explanation, it remains at its core a national interpretation of the Canadian warexperience.The problem with this nationalist framework, argues Robert Rutherdale, is that formost Canadians the Great War was primarily a local event. Drawing upon evidencefrom Lethbridge (Alberta), Guelph (Ontario), and Trois-Rivières (Quebec), Ruth-erdale portrays the home front as a convergence of imperial, national, and local inter-ests, but dominated and shaped by the latter. Troops enlisted and often trained locallyand began their journey to the front lines from local train stations. Local newspaperstransmitted news of the war that recast distant events through familiar referencepoints. Recruitment drives, charitable organizations, and fundraising efforts all reliedupon local networks to achieve their goals and further the national war effort. Com-memoration and remembrance was also local as communities erected memorials andinscribed them with the names of local boys who did not return from the war andstruggled to accommodate those who did.Unlike Ian Miller’s study of wartime Toronto, Rutherdale does not view the war asa unifying force. Hometown Horizons instead offers a dizzying array of competinginterests, hierarchies, and in many cases, the reinforcement of social and culturalboundaries. In the case of Trois-Rivières, the rituals and imagery associated withrecruitment failed to attract significant numbers of French Canadians and only servedto highlight cultural and ethnic differences. In Lethbridge and Guelph, middle-classinterests controlled and directed charitable relief to maintain the existing social struc-ture. Across the country, enemy aliens struggled to prove their loyalty to Canada inthe face of public suspicion and exaggerated reports of sabotage and invasion. Con-

Ruggiero, Kristin — Modernity in the Flesh: Medicine, Law, and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina

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Ruggiero, Kristin — Modernity in the Flesh: Medicine, Law, and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)