Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa Book

Well, it's a sad situation: the Okinawans were caught in the middle of the Japanese and the US during WWII. Atrocities were committed. The Okinawans still have to deal with the presence of US bases. The book navigates a delicate path, and does it gracefully and convincingly. Dr. Nelson looks at what you might call revitalized Okinawan traditions (especially modes of storytelling, dancing, drumming). The book does not evaluate these performances in terms of authenticity (which would actually ignore the historical context), nor does it directly frame them as responses to the horrors of war (which would render invisible complexity and creativity of the Okinawans' practices and ideas). The book is a model of how to do and write ethnography in a situation where people are dealing with a traumatic history. It deftly draws on De Certeau, among others; the theoretical touchstones are integrated lightly into the text, which makes for smoother (easier and more engaging) reading, but may dissapoint people who want to be directed to lots of chapter and verse citations of the theoretical literature.