Economic anthropology has two ‘sacred' field sites—one in Melanesia, the other in Central America—and the empirical data gathered from these sites has set the theoretical agenda for the sub-discipline. Malinowski conducted seminal fieldwork in both of these areas and the respective subjects of his investigations tells us much about the socio-economic concerns of people in Melanesia and Central America. His classic ethnography on the Kula exchange system of the Milne Bay area of Papua New Guinea, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, established Melanesia as the classic home of gift exchange. The postwar ethnographies have only served to confirm the passion Melanesians have for creating intricate forms of gift exchange: Andrew Strathern's The Rope of Moka, introduced us to the ties that bind the ‘big men' in the Highlands; Michael Young's Fighting with Food: Leadership, Values and Social Control in a Massim Society, challenged us to rethink the social role of food, and so on. These ethnographies, and many others like them, have provided the ethnographic base on which general theories of the gift have risen, Marilyn Strathern's The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, being the best-known recent synthesis. The product of Malinowski's Central American fieldwork, Malinowski in Mexico: The Economics of a Mexican Market System (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), which he wrote with J. de la Fuente, has not had the impact of Argonauts, for a number of reasons, including the fact that an English translation of the 1957 Spanish edition took some twenty-five years to appear, and that his research, carried out in 1940, was not pioneering in the same ethnographic and theoretical way that Argonauts was. His Mexican work was part of a long tradition of American scholarship on the peasant-artisan commodity producers of this area. Commodity production and exchange is to the people of Central America what gift exchange is to Melanesians. However, the exchange of commodities in Central America is a not ceremonial ritual, but rather everyday reality that the people must undertake in order to survive. It has been this way for centuries, which is why Central American ethnographers have devoted so much time to describing and analyzing petty commodity reproduction. This is not to say that market exchange is unimportant for the people of Melanesia, but what sets Melanesia apart is that gift exchange has flourished under the impact of capitalism, and it is this question that commentators have tried to describe and explain. What then are the peculiar social conditions found in Central America that account for the specificities of the economy found there? What conceptual frameworks have economic anthropologists developed to come to terms with these facts?

It is these questions that Cook tries to answer in his Understanding Commodity Cultures. The book is not only a comprehensive intellectual history of the prominent anthropologists who have written on the economy of Central America, it is also an original theoretical treatment of commodity culture. The book is a very impressive achievement: the synthesis of a lifetime's work that draws heavily on Cook's extensive fieldwork in Mexico and his wide reading of the ethnographic and theoretical literature.

Four chapters in the first part of the book contain detailed critiques of the main concepts advanced by various well-know economic anthropologists. He examines George Foster's notion of the “limited good,” Redfield's “primitive merchants,” Sol Tax's “penny capitalism,” and Wolf's “peasant economy.” Interestingly, he also devotes one chapter to the realistic fictional narratives of B. Traven, an ethnographically trained Mexican novelist whose work is “a tribute to the resilience and ingenuity of Mexico's peasant artisans” (p. 41). Two core chapters in the middle of the book aim “to set the groundwork for new theoretical approach to economic anthropology” (11). He does this by means of a re-examination of the “great debate” in economic anthropology from a “Twenty-First-Century lens.” It is here that he develops his notion of “commodity culture(s).” This is then used to develop an ethnographic critique of the ‘peasant-artisan' literature in Central America, including the Oaxaca Valley Zapotec, The Maya of Chiapas, and the Gulf Nahua of Veracruz. The book concludes with a look at the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the question of migration and identity in the “new transborder space.”

Cook's notion of “commodity culture(s)” does not admit of simple summary; suffice to say that it owes much to a critical, ethnographically informed reading of Marx, Polanyi, and many leading theorists of commodity reproduction. The concept is one of some generality but Cook strays little from the ethnographic terrain he knows best. The book will be of specialist interest to Central Americanists but also of general theoretical interest to economic anthropologists. Economic anthropology is going through something of a renaissance and this important erudite work can only give impetus to that movement. Cook's gift to economic anthropology has been to synthesize the one hundred years of economic thought and ethnographic analysis from one of economic anthropology's ‘sacred' sites. His work points to the need for a comparable synthesis from the other ‘sacred' site in Melanesia. Such a work would, along with Cook's book, provide the necessary foundations for a revitalized economic anthropology for the twenty-first century.