This has been a very difficult review to write. In part, the difficulty stems fromthe books under review themselves. They are both extremely impressive albeitvery different collections. One consists of a series of working papers whose pro-visionality is belied by their acuity. The other consists of a series of tightly fo-cused essays by anthropologists, historians, and legal scholars which workexceptionally well together, forming a volume that puts forward a strong, coher-ent, and important agenda for studies of law and culture. The challenge in writ-ing this review does not just derive from the quality of the work but also from itssubstantive focus: the institutional and intellectual histories and trajectories ofinterdisciplinarity in the university today (which Strathern investigates, ethnography-style, and which Pottage and Mundy’s volume exemplifies) and the relationshipbetween interdisciplinarity, society (broadly defined), and science (also broadlydefined) in the makeup of persons, things, and their relations

Recent discussions of globalization leave the nature of movement and of the moving objects in transnational flows relatively unexamined. Incorporating historical and ethnographic material from the British Virgin Islands, I use the analogy of the critique of the study of kinship, which highlights the assumptions of person and relation built into kinship theory, to shed light on the assumptions of property and the metaphysics of movement built into globalization research.