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Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics. By Niko Besnier. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 243, acknowledgments, orthography and transcription conventions, notes, references, index. $49.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.)
If we can admit to it, many of us indulge in the practice of gossip as a pleasurable social habit, while simultaneously viewing it at the best of times as morally ambiguous. Gossip has long been theorized by anthropologists who have seen it as alternately as a tool of social reinforcement (a la Gluckman) or one meant to further personal agendas and undermine rivals (e.g. Paine). In Gossip Niko Besnier examines the idea diat gossip is more than a "weapon of the weak," as James C. Scott has argued, but rather central to the enactment of everyday politics. Based on years of fieldwork on the small Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu, the author presents a fine-grained analysis of the quotidian discourses that suffuse social networks on the atoll. Drawing materials from recordings he made no secret of making (39-40), Besnier candidly admits that by writing about gossip he risks producing a document that the Nukulaelae people, "or rather the small but growing number of Nukulaelae people who will be able to read this book," will not like (19).
In chapter 1, "Gossip, Hegemony, Agency," the author situates himself firmly within the literature of linguistic anthropology and gossip theory and begins to explore the ways in which gossip is mobilized towards political ends. Contrasting gossip with...