David W. Samuels, Putting a song on top of it: Expression and identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. Pp. x, 324. Hb. $39.95.

David W. Samuels's Putting a song on top of it is at once an explication of current Western Apache practices and a study of how Western Apaches imagine and evoke “history” through music. Samuels's purpose is to describe and at times explain the multifaceted ways Western Apaches index continuity through music and talk about music. Samuels is interested in the “ambiguities” and “creative” uses of indexicality (p. 10). Crucial to his project is understanding the “feelingful iconicity” of discourses of and about expressive forms (11). This “feelingful iconicity” is based on the “emotional attachment to aesthetic forms” (11).