'Metaphors of Interpretation' is a collection of essays in honor of William Stanner, a key figure in the development of Australian anthropology. The collection, edited by three of his former students, shows the influence of Stanner's theoretical contributions and indirectly comments on the manner in which Australian anthropology has been shaped by governmental, institutional, and applied interests. The opening essay is a comprehensive biography of Stanner's career. (...) A bibliography of published and unpublished work at the close of this collection indicates the scope of his interests and the fervor with which he worked. (...) Five of the eight essays in this collection deal with topics of classical interest in British social anthropology: social organization, kinship, and ritual. Raymond Firth, in an essay on humor in Tikopia, argues that humor needs to be understood as not epiphenomenal to social structure, but as a vital ingredient in social and ritual processes. Michael Young examines Melanesian cargo cults and shows that the significance of ceremonial exchange, especially of refusing gifts, has varied meaning depending on particular contextual circumstances. Marie Reay focusses on the ritual of pig sacrifice in the Papua New Guinea highlands. She argues that the structure of this ritual, rather than being a structure sui generis, is instead the product of pragmatic, intentional activity. Kenneth Maddock takes Stanner's structural model of sacrifice and applies it to Australian Aboriginal rituals to determine the model's cross-cultural validity and usefulness. Finally, H.W. Scheffler, in a somewhat dense essay, analyses kinship categories among an Australian Aboriginal people to conclude, in defense of Radcliffe-Brown's assertion, that "kin-class statuses are the elementary structures of Australian social life" (p. 180). In each of these analyses the broader historical, political and economic contexts of Aboriginal ritual and social organization are not considered, and implicit images of static traditional cultures result. The three other essays are of a different approach and focus. Jeremy Beckett, examining the survival of a cargo cult in the Torres Strait Islands, Book Reviews 309 illustrates how anthropological knowledge is a product both of the relationship between fieldworker and informant and of the interactions that result. Diane Barwick, in the context of a biography of an Australian Aboriginal woman, shows how government definitions of "aboriginality" were created in efforts to control the Aboriginal populations, and how Aboriginal people worked within these constraints to manipulate definitions of identity for their own purposes. The last essay, by Nancy Williams, outlines Aboriginal processes of decision-making and highlights the importance of understanding contemporary cultural processes amongst Australian Aboriginal people as they interact with White institutions and officials. As a whole, this book provides an interesting statement of the origin and development of Australian anthropology, and of the conditions under which anthropological knowledge in Australia has been generated. (Elizabeth Furniss, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, V5A 1S6