The Mermaid and the Lobster Diver is an ethnographic study of a Miskito community on the coast of Honduras. As the title suggests, it is mainly concerned with analysing how the community's economic dependence on lobster diving has shaped ideas about gender and sexuality and relations between men and women in a small coastal village where 90 per cent of the men work diving for lobsters while the women remain in the village tending their households and trying to find ways to procure the wages of the men in order to buy consumer goods in a society that relies less and less on subsistence activities. Laura Herlihy uses these twin images of the lobster diver and the mermaid to show how ideas of masculinity have come to be synonymous with the dangerous work of lobster diving and the machista prerogatives of drinking and womanising that come with breadwinner status, while femininity has come to be associated with the mermaid, a water spirit that beguiles the lobster diver with her sexuality in order to trap him and take away his livelihood. She argues that this demonstrates that male Miskito bodies have become commoditised in the global economy of resource extraction while relations between men and women have become commercialised such that they mainly consist of women using love potions and other strategies to manipulate men into giving them their money. Her claims are primarily supported by buzo songs composed and performed by the lobster divers in which the ambiguities of masculine power (breadwinners, sexual prowess and so on) are coupled with the dangers of lobster diving, the pain of long absences from families, and fear of women who only want them for their earnings. In order to avoid depicting the women as gold-diggers and femmes fatales, Herlihy argues that their strategies are a form of resistance to a global economy that has left them on the margins of wage-earning potential and of an otherwise patriarchal society (Honduras) in which domestic violence and womanising are common male practices that women must negotiate.

Herlihy sets her study within a long-standing literature on the complex gender relations created by matrifocality. The Miskito, like many societies of the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean area, have households and families that have female heads of household, matrilineal inheritance, matrilocality, emphasis on matrilineal kin, senior women as family leaders, weak conjugal bonds and the important role of women as healers and in ritual activity. Herlihy shows that while this emphasis on matrifocality does create a certain degree of female autonomy in which women have power over how money is spent in their households, the labour of household members, and their sexuality, men are still the primary sources of cash and are openly allowed to drink, womanise and discipline their wives while women must socialise and have sexual liaisons out of the view of the men. This has generated a system of female solidarity in which women warn other women of the arrival of their husbands, share resources garnered from men, and share knowledge of love potions and other magic to hook men and their money. Men also bond while on the lobster boats and while on break in the village through drinking and revelling in their masculine prowess as breadwinners and survivors of a dangerous and exploitative industry.

While the topics covered and the arguments made in this book are fascinating and add to our understanding of a society that has received little ethnographic attention, they are often under-theorised and backed up with thin ethnographic evidence. For example, the politics of sex are a main theme, and the descriptions of the ways in which women take advantage of men's seemingly constant state of inebriation and desire for sex while in the village are interesting and add to a rich literature on forms of female agency. Herlihy leaves these issues mainly at the level of description, however, with no interview material or other ways of knowing what men and women think about the situation other than the buzo songs. Another aspect of the politics of sex that she mentions but does not explore in much depth is a practice in which men give presents of money to women for sex while they are on leave from the lobster boats. Though she explains that the women see these gifts as signs of affection (rather than payment for services) and the men and women may have long-standing relations with one another and even children together, she continues to refer to the practice as ‘transactional sex’, a label used to refer to a myriad of sexual relations which exist in a grey area between prostitution and ‘normal’ romantic relations. Since ‘transactional sex’ is such a nebulous term and the label can lend itself to ethnocentric interpretations, it is very important that it be backed up with more ethnographic evidence, especially the experiences and points of view of the parties involved. Without a thorough treatment of the topic through examples, interviews and so forth, the reader is left with an image of sexually promiscuous Miskito women who are only interested in men for their money (a fear the buzo songs express) without knowing what the women's motivations are or how they or the men see the practice.

Another area that could have been explored in greater depth is the issue of the perils of masculinity. This ethnography demonstrates how the men, though privileged in the sense of having access to a relatively lucrative source of wage labour, must face dangerous working conditions (including those associated with diving at unsafe depths without the proper equipment or training, and the drug trade that is rampant on the Miskito Coast), long absences from family, and the psychological and health effects of excessive drinking and drugs. But again there is no interview material to indicate how the men feel about these ‘wages of masculinity’, their pride, fears, doubts and so on, which would have given depth to Herlihy's analysis of masculinity and the complex relations it creates between men and women and among men.

And finally there is the theme of the mermaid, the water spirit that primarily appears in the form of a blonde white woman who lures men into the deep with her sexual charms in order to steal their souls and punish them for taking too many lobsters. Herlihy writes that the mermaid is a symbol of the anxieties that are produced in men who must sacrifice their bodies to a global economy that puts luxury food on the table of North Americans, while simultaneously living up to the pressures of providing for women back on the shore. This resonates with a large literature on other indigenous beliefs in spirits who exploit the labour and sexuality of indigenous peoples, such as El Tio of the Bolivian mines, the Andean pishtaco and the Mayan witz – and yet, as with the other topics, the mermaid is given short treatment in this book. Its potential as a commentary on the racialised, gendered and sexualised dimensions of the ‘negative exchange principle’ of the global economy are not really explored, only mentioned.

In sum, this book covers some very interesting examples of the politics of sex and gender, the ambiguities of masculinity, and indigenous critiques of capitalism in a society that exists between the margins of Central America and the Caribbean, Afro-descendent and indigenous peoples, matrifocal and patriarchal gender relations, and subsistence economies and ‘purchase societies’. Herlihy's arguments are insightful and there is wonderful ethnographic description, but the book lacks a depth of analysis that might have come with a deeper treatment of the voices of the Miskito people.