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municative techniques. This suggestion is no doubt influenced by their work with Athabascan people, whom they represent as lying at the extreme negative-face end of the world continuum of politeness styles. However, in m j own work in a sccial contpxt at the opposite end of the rontinuum, amon9 rural proletarians in central Mexico who use positive-face politeness in a very wide range of interactional contexts, I have found that attention to negative face is often perceived as giving insult, even between strangers. Thus the Scollon's suggestion should be applied with caution. However, their proposal that positive-face politeness yields potentially schismogenetic positive-feedback loops is certainly supported by the Mexican situation, which manifests this structural problem with positive politeness in a very high rate of violence between intimates. A more serious concern I have with the present volume, and with much new work in interethnic communication. is that analysis is largely divorced from the material realities of interethnic interaction, even within an analytical framework which is otherwise ambitiously holistic. The Scollons do not develop the possibility that the interactional tcchniques which realize "bush consciousness" may not be only one aspect of a set of arctic survival strategies, but may also have developed in defensive reaction to two centuries of conflict with predatory Europeans. Nor do they consider that the "modem consciousness" and its "essayist literacy" may be strategies of domination which have emerged in class conflict. The historical background and contemporary structural reality which underlies "interethnic communication" between Europeans and Athabascans is the violent expropriation of resources: a reality which will not be changed when individuals modify the communicative strategies used in face-to-face encounters, and a reality which is not conducive to the institutional tolerance of pluralism urged by the Scollons. However, the clarity and humanity of their analyses make the present volume deserving of a wide readership. It offers provocative suggestions for researchers, valuable classroom material for teachers, and advice based on sophisticated analysis presented briefly and clearly for human-service professionals.

Indiana University Press, 1982. 248 pp. $22.50 (cloth). Donald Brenneis Pitzer College
The Three Twins is an exceptionally fine book, an important contribution to south Asian folklore studies in particular, and to a better understanding of oral epic in general. Beck's focus is on a single regimal epic from Tamilnadu, south India. Her discussion draks its remarkable strength and interest from a series of contrastive analyses-of two oral versions of the epic by the same performer. of eight oral and published versions, and of the epic with the pan-Indian Mahabharata. Each set of comparisons compels a fresh consideration of the content, poetic features and cultural implications of this popular local narrative. The primary figures in the story are triplets, two brothers and one sister. The circumstances of their lives are in large part determined by the earlier actions of both humans and the divine; several versions explore this prehistory in great detail. The two brothers rise through a series of wars with their cousins and with jungle-dwelling hunters to a shared kinship, guided by the magical vision and powers of their sister. At the predetermined age of 16. the brothers kill themselves. to be resurrected briefly by theii. sister, who then dies with them. Beck reads the narrative in a number of ways: as an account of political and military activity in central Tamilnadu circa 1450; as a mandate for ritual reenactments and local festivals; and as a commentary on such pan-Indian themes as rela. tionships between castes and within families, the obligations of kingship and the roles and powers of male and female. A fascinating aspect of this Commentary is how it differs from that in the Mahabharata, an India-wide epic with which tellers of "The Three Twins" are quite familiar. The proprieties and values of the Mahabharata are treated playfully in the local epic through irony and inversion, a rejection of broader Hindu notions in favor of local belief contributing to the determinedly regional character of the story. Becks treatment of the style of "The Three Twins" is also quite interesting in the comparison of dictated and performed versions and of oral and written ones. Her detailed description of the interplay between text and such musical features as rhythmic and melodic variaticn in performance is especially enlightening.

The Three Twins: The Telling of a South Indian Folk Epic. Brenda E. Beck. Bloomington:

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Altogether this volume offers a great deal; it is a significant and most welcome contribution.

T h e Aymara Language in Its Social and Cultural Context: A Collection of Essays on Aspects o f Aymara Language and Culture. M. J.Hardman (ed). Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1981. xiv + 317 pp. $25.00 (paper). Jill Brody Louisiana State University This volume is composed of 24 papers written over a span of ten years by 19 different authors. The papers all focus on and reveal to various e x tents different aspects of Aymara linguistic postulates -the ideas or concepts or themes which permeate throughout and influence all aspects of a language. Linguistic postulates will be realized at several levels within the grammatical structure as well as within the vocabulary and ultimately within the culture itself (p. 11). The notion of linguistic postulates is extremely important for all kinds of language and culture studies. Aymara linguistic postulates include data source (the obligatory indication of personal witness vs. nonwitness of events reported), human versus nonhuman, and overmarking of second person. All of these are powerfully connected with politeness in language use. A very particular definition of politeness based on the recognition of the presence and humanity of others permeates the Aymara language in its use. The use of politeness is not confined to interactions with strangers or distant acquaintances, but operates even in intimacy. The articles are divided into three sections, each with an introduction by the editor: (1) Aymara Grammatical and Semantic Categories and World View contains six articles on kinship, ethnosemantics, politeness. and cross-cultural perceptions of conversation. Two of the best papers appear in this section: Miracle and Yapitas in-depth analysis of Time and Space in Aymara and Briggss Politeness in Aymara Language and Culture. (2) The Aymara Language in Contact with Other Languages and Contexts contains eight articles on the interinfluence of Spanish and Aymara in phonology, lexicon, grammar, and pragmatics. Insufficient work has been done on the linguistic effects of the long-term contact between Spanish and the languages of the New World, and these papers make a real contribution. (3) Implica-

tions of the Aymara Studies for Applied Anthropological Linguistics includes four articles on Aymara in its political, social, and linguistic context. The approach to application of anthropological linguistics presented here from the vantage of the work done by the Aymara Language Materials Project, and including native speaker perspectives, is extremely valuable. This volume provides a companion to the three volumes of grammatical and dialogue material compiled in 1975 by M. J. Hardman. Juana Vasquez, and Juan de Dios Yapita, Aymar ar yatiqaritaki (To Learn Aymara). Together they represent an admirable picture of Aymara language structure and its use in cultural context. The quality of the papers in this volume ranges from fair to excellent: many of the papers were originally prepared as term papers for courses at the University of Florida. Despite this unevenness and a certain amount of overlap, this collection is impressive in range, scope, and depth of its analysis of Aymara language in its cultural context, and the students involved in the Aymara Language Material Project obviously profited greatly from it; clearly the native-speaker collaborators, some of whom authored articles in the volume. are talented and devoted teachers and interpreters of Aymara language and culture. One would like to see more of chis kind of native speaker involvement. and one wishes there were material of this scope and depth for many other languages.

Florentine Codex: General History of the f New Spain. ArfhurJ. 0 . Anderson Things o and Charles E. Dibble. Santa Fe: The School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1982. 160 pp. $35.00 (cloth). James R. Jaquith Saint Marys University The genius Bemardino de Sahaiqin was born in Spain at the turn of the 16th century. Already a Franciscan friar. he arrived in what is now Mexico in 1529. While for the rest of his life (he died at 90) he maintained his missionary commitments as primary goals, he developed methods for gathering information about Aztec culture which merit the label ethnography, a work of a quality not approached until the present century. His magnum opus is of impressively broad scope, the data set down by Aztecs taught