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Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 245 como Carmen Conde, Õ ngela Figuera, Mar Ã-a Beneyto y Angelina Gatell, que escribÃ-an poemas intimistas; y cómo ellas mismas, tras la contienda, cambian el lenguaje, y en sus poemas aparece plasmado el brutal despertar, no sólo a la realidad, sino a un replanteamiento del papel histórico que ha tenido la mujer desde el comienzo, es decir, desde Eva. La mujer es la eterna desterrada, la que no tiene acceso al ParaÃ-so por ser la culpable. El lenguaje bÃ-blico en la poesÃ-a de los exilios españoles de 1939 es un libro imprescindible en el estudio de la temática de los poetas de la posguerra, tanto para los que se quedaron en España, que denuncian la incomunicación y el aislamiento que sufrieron, el exilio interior, como para los que abandonaron España, la "peregrina." LuI ú Gabikagojeaskoa The University of Memphis CrÃ-tica de L· singtdaridad cultural Editorial Anthropos, 2003 By Aurora Gonzalez EchevarrÃ-a This is a book by an anthropologist who has worked hard, as we are told in the first paragraph, against "the seduction of fieldwork" and in favor of "methodology." She adds that "not even the beauty of the fishermen entering port the spring evenings before sunset" could dissuade her that anthropology should be "a method of constructing theoretical concepts that would be useful for trans-cultural comparison." The reader begins to wonder: is she going to argue that ethnographers should replace their usual motto "from the native's point of view" with something closer to "from Carnap's point of view"? The answer is definitely no. González EchevarrÃ-a takes the reader through some of the main theoretical debates of the social sciences ofthe last century (the hermeneutic circle, methodological monism, the rationality debate, the limits of interpretation, various types of relativism) to conclude with a sophisticated but eclectic view of how to practice social science in the contemporary world. Anthropologists in particular have been asking themselves for some time now whether what they do is "science" or "art." EvansPritchard , whose monographs were considered by many the best examples ofthe ethnographer's trade, convinced most anthropologists that it was "art." But for obvious epistemological and institutional reasons the discipline could not afford to give up the mantle of science. My favorite epistemologist, Gregory Bateson, long complained about anthropology's muddle-headedness . "I went into anthropology and stopped thinking," he quipped. He'd like to quote Pascal ("A tear is an intellectual thing") or take William Blake as his mentor ("Chiaroscuro is all very well, but William Blake tells us firmly that wise men see outlines and therefore they draw them") before he would immerse himself in the formal complexities ofthe problem at hand, where the real issues always are, be it mammalian communication , ritual patterns, or the pathologies of schizophrenia. Professor González EchevarrÃ-a belongs to this much needed tradition of epistemological rigor in a discipline that is, after all, more adept, in Geertz's words, at "looking into dragons, not domesticating or abominating them, nor drowning them in vats of theory," and in a period in history in which, with globalization and postmodernity, "anything goes" has become methodologically defensible. A key argument of González EcheverrÃ-a is that contemporary science has abandoned the distinction between theory and observation, and that each one of our terms and observations is filled with presupposition and theory. She makes a strong case against methodological monism, although I prefer to criticize causal arguments from the cybernetic viewpoint of teleological and non-teleological systems, rather than from Hempel's or Giddens's writings. Like her, I believe that Sperber's work is most helpful in bridging theory and ethnography, although my favorite Sperber is the one of Rethinking Symbolism . After a tortuous tour deforce, she comes to validate Geertz's view of ethnography as "thick description" by insisting, how else, that there 246 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies is a lot of theory implicit in his ethnographic craft. Her concluding comments on the merits of some postmodern criticisms I find balanced and revealing. An author central to this work is Kuhn...

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