Book Review: Bioregionalism

taken by the book, is that no mention is made of Bataille. This, presumably, reflects simply the timing of the original book. Having conveyed something of the book’s basic orientation, I shall try in the space remaining to provide some impressions of its overall significance. Firstly, those familiar with Bauman’s recent work will undoubtedly delight in seeing here the early shoots of ideas that have since blossomed to their fullest glory. Perhaps some of the seeds scattered in Culture as praxis fell on stony ground. The majority, however, have indeed flourished and since come to fruition in Bauman’s later works: one finds in Culture as praxis early discussions of the ideology of culture, ordering, the slimy, freedom, the stranger, the Other, fear, boundaries, space and spacing, and so on. Secondly, the book as a whole is an impressive and virtuosic piece of writing, able just as well to find a route through the dense thickets of the structuralist literature as it is to leap lightly from general systems theory to classical thought, from phenomenology to structuralism, between the American and British anthropological traditions, and so on. Finally, and most significantly of all, the approach Bauman adopts not only makes sense of structuralism whilst anticipating many of the developments of poststucturalism, but is as convincing an argument as one could hope for against not only the limited objectivism of positivist social science, but also the reactive, humanistic, subjectivist anti-positivist stances to which that train of thought growing out through structuralism and culminating in poststructuralism also bids farewell.