The subjects covered by these authors—nudity, the body's surface, cleanliness, clothing, and various cultural formations and representations related to these topics—are important ones. The essays are excellent and provocative, both theoretically and descriptively, and present original arguments and material.

One expects, given the subject matter, that Mary Douglas' work on purity and pollution would be given prominent place, but most of the authors instead adopt the position presented by Masquelier in her introduction: “The present volume makes a break with the anthropological wisdom that dirt and disorder can be explained in terms of universal and unchanging structural patterns to illuminate the complex and nuanced strategies at work in local processes of dirtying and undressing” (p. 4).

This correction follows three paths. First, a theoretical and empirical argument is made in favor of historicity and specificity against universalism, in this case regarding bodies, sweat, and dirt. Second, it is claimed the specific history of colonial rule has created an epistemological barrier to understanding these (and other subjects) in properly historical, specific, and local terms. Third, it is asserted that universal claims about subjects like bodies, nudity, or dirt are actually local and particular to the history of the West, but that, as a consequence of colonialism and globalization, they have been integrated into non-Western practices and discourses. Specific, local studies are required to understand this process and its outcomes in any given society.

In many ways it is hard to quarrel with this approach. For example, who could disagree with Wiener's argument that due to tourism and globalization “in Bali what once was merely naked now is nude,” and that Balinese bodies have been sexualized through a history of globalizing contacts and relations (88)? Parallel arguments in each essay strike me as straightforwardly factual accounts of real, complex transformations in the meanings and practices of bodies, clothing, and cleanliness now visible in contemporary societies.

I did find problems in Masquelier's introductory framing of the volume. First, it casts this kind of analysis as an insurgent response to an established orthodoxy. I would argue that the basic scholarly strategies in this volume are the current orthodoxy, at least within history and anthropology. Second, it seems to me that we are still struggling with the residual force of a perspective that most of us disavow when it is made explicit: that modernity and colonialism have contaminated non-Western authenticities, and that the project of non-Western history and anthropology is to recover those authenticities on their own terms. All of the contributors here are far too smart and theoretically sophisticated to deliberately reproduce this view. But it lurks around the edges: in the insistence that the transformations of the colonial and the modern have always produced new instrumental forms of power over bodies and new kinds of possible masteries, and in the understanding of the move from there to here, from then to now, as one of loss and tragedy. In reality, bodies that become nude, or clean, or fashionable gain as well as lose, and in some cases they are transformed in ways difficult to notch on any sort of balance sheet.

I ended up wishing this account were more banal and universal. I mean this not in the sense that bodies, nudity, clothing, and cleanliness have single, fixed meanings in all human societies. Rather, I would argue that some of the transformations we are inclined to describe as unique consequences of modernity and colonialism are in fact more widely distributed in historical experience. If we are to “provincialize the West,” the modern colonial encounter cannot be understood as in every way unprecedented in human experience, as a unique and exclusive epistemological nightmare sharing no parallels with other times and places.

For some of these essays, taking this approach would diminish their sense of analytic mission. But that might be a good thing, reminding us that in studying subjects like the body or clothing our project is partly descriptive. We can afford to be less reflexively antagonized by universalizing claims. Concepts like “modernity” make no sense without some sort of general or comparative baseline. Human bodies may mean and represent in very different ways across time and space, but in material terms, a sixteenth-century non-Western body has much in common with a twenty-first-century globalized body. Indeed, these authors make good use of both theoretical and empirical material from the work of scholars exploring very different societies and practices. So some kind of comparative, even universalizing yardstick is in use here, though it enters through the back door of disciplinarity.

None of this negates the great virtues of this anthology, nor is any of this critique confined to this book. I only suggest that it is time for the framing of the rich research it contains to evolve in new directions.