Recent scholarship on Zionism has shown Orientalism to be a pregnant concept through which to study the formation of Jewish society and culture in Palestine and later Israel. As this body of scholarship suggests, Zionist self-perception as an outpost of Western civilization in the Orient has played a fundamental role in shaping both Zionism's relations to the Palestinians and to its “internal Others”—mizrahi, literally, Oriental Jews. Indeed, it was Zioinist Orientalism which created the mizrahi category in the first place, turning heterogeneous Asian, North African, and Palestine's Sephardic Jewish communities into a single, supposedly coherent group in need of modernization and civilization, against which the ‘westernness’ of European ashkenazi Jews was repeatedly asserted. What these studies often overlook is that the Zionist ‘civilizing mission’ was initially directed at (east) European Jews. Thus, for many of the “culture builders” who during the mandate years operated in the yishuv—the Jewish community of Palestine—Jewish westernness was deemed a project, something yet to be achieved.

In Hagen's Community in the Balance, one finds both a fine and deeply empathetic ethnography of a marginal hill-people in Eastern Indonesia and a subtle meditation on the fragility of this, and indeed any, human community.

Appadurai's Fear of Small Numbers is an important contribution to the study of one of the most harmful aspects of modernity, violence against minorities. Although anthropology—a discipline prolific on the topics of ethnicity, nationalism, and religious identity, as well as modernity—is well situated to offer insight into this problem, few anthropologists have addressed it in general terms. We can thus view Appadurai's monograph as the beginning of an important conversation, and like many seminal works, his contains both monumental insights and notable missteps.

Few debates have maintained as persistent and passionate a level of interest and international scope—whether in the United States, France, or Turkey—as that around secularism. A cursory glance at the titles alone of books and articles on the subject tells us that this is a debate in which serious personal and political stakes are invested. At the very least the debate has been generated by the recognition that a new language of politics is needed to understand the role of religious self-expression in the public sphere. The received wisdom about distinctions between the putatively mutually exclusive domains of public and private, or sacred and secular, simply does not hold water any more. The secularism debate also raises issues of fundamental significance to the very “personality of the state,” as Talal Asad has characterized it. In France, the laicite debate has highlighted how the claim of a minority population to don items of clothing (a right denied by the secular government in Turkey with a majority Muslim population), which it sees as fundamental to its religious self-expression, has challenged the state's own image as a secular republic. In the United States, controversy has been ignited by challenges to the boundary line between private religious practice and the public domain of the state, whether it relates to school prayer or the ongoing battles between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists.

Anthropologist Veena Das here revisits two critical events in Indian history: the Partition riots of 1947, and the violence against Sikhs following the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Though Das has grappled with complex (and sometimes tortured) analyses of these same events in previous works, Life and Words represents an important departure from her more narrowly ethnographic essays. She readjusts her focus toward a theoretical/philosophical interrogation of the “ordinary” in an effort to complicate existing temporal and epistemological assumptions that have characterized studies of violence in India. The book is a two-part study: It first examines the way in which extraordinary violence (in this case that of Partition) gets “folded” into the everyday lives of those who have survived catastrophe. Second, she turns to how the violence of everyday life provides the necessary conditions for “eventful” eruptions of collective violence (in this case that against Sikhs in 1984). In blurring the boundaries between the ordinary and the eventful, Das is able to gain significant insights into the interface between the individual and the collective, the local and the supralocal, and the historical and the anthropological.

As a result of colonial wars with indigenous peoples, especially in Africa and North America, a distinction seems to have arisen in Western military culture between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ enemies. The behavior of civilized enemies in battle appeared rational and constrained by rules. Savage enemies, on the other hand, evinced emotional and unregulated violence. Above all, they were distinguished by an excessive brutality they seemed to display towards their enemies in customs such as cannibalism and the taking of body parts as trophies (see, for example, Marks 1970: 246). In short, the differences between civilized people and savages in warfare were especially evident in their behavior toward enemy dead.

The politics of nature are at play in forests and nations, as well as within contested memories and variably shaded skin. By tracing the connections between these realms, we can learn how difference becomes racialized in cultural politics. This is Jake Kosek's argument in Understories, an ethnography of the virulent struggles that have raged over the use and control of forests in northern New Mexico. Aligning himself primarily with a Hispano community in Truchas, New Mexico, while also reaching out to local forestry officials and environmentalists, Kosek conducted ethnographic fieldwork and archival study into the conflict that has pitted advocates of conservation, scientific management, and local subsistence use against one other. Kosek found that race was a powerful but frequently avoided factor in the dispute, and rather than shying away from race as a politically sensitive subject, he takes this as a motivation for writing. The book represents a successful example of engaged anthropology, since the analysis is both ethnographically innovative and politically useful to those he studies.

When Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a medical student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she spent the autumn of 1901 constructing an anatomical model of a young human brain. Most accounts call it an “embryo” brain, although as we shall see it likely belonged to a fetus or infant. The assignment was her final opportunity to obtain the medical degree after failing four classes in the spring of her senior year. Her anatomy professor, Franklin Paine Mall (1982–1917), offered her a second chance to graduate if she would finish her brain model and write an accompanying manuscript. Stein eventually produced sixty-three drawings and “roughly twenty-five pages of text,” in addition to the model itself (Meyer 2001: 89). She submitted the work in January 1902, but Mall judged it as inept and threw it away. Stein set off for Europe, leaving medicine behind forever. She settled in Paris where she became an avant-garde writer most notably known for her book supposedly chronicling the life of Alice Babette Toklas (1877–1967), who was Stein's longtime lover, secretary, editor, cook, and companion. The book, published in 1933, narrated the life of the inimitable Gertrude Stein, although it was playfully titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

The early modern period has aptly been called the “wooden age,” when timber, directly or indirectly, provided most of the material underpinnings of European and other societies. Most scholars who have been interested in wood as a historical problem have approached it from the perspective of historical geography or landscape. In this new book, Paul Warde analyzes the economic and political dimensions of timber in early modern Germany. Focusing on the relatively small Duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany, Warde uses timber as a way to both map out the material constraints of life in early modern communities, and to undertake an analysis of state development that moves away from abstract categories such as sovereignty and authority, and toward the concrete problems faced by rulers and bureaucrats as they sought to regulate crucial aspects of everyday life. In so doing, Warde seeks to situate local and regional communities within a well-defined ecological context so as to understand better the kinds of economic choices that early modern Europeans, like other pre-modern people, faced. This is something that environmental historians like to talk about at great length, even though they often neglect it in practice. To his credit, Warde puts his analysis where his mouth is.

For centuries descendents of people from the region of Hadramawt on the southern Arabian Peninsula have navigated the Indian Ocean and inhabited its far-flung littorals. Engseng Ho's The Graves of Tarim offers an anthropological history of these Hadramis, in particular the ‘Alawī Sayyids, one line of the Prophet Muhammad's descendants through his daughter Fāt˙ima and cousin ‘Alī. Beginning in the graveyards of Tarim, a town in Hadramawt where some of the earliest ‘Alawī ancestors are buried, Ho describes genealogical rituals developed at the turn of the fifteenth century used to “presence” those buried there, bringing the living into contact with the dead. These practices, which Ho identifies with a complex of Sufi practices (t˙arīqa) called “the ‘Alawī Way,” took on new resonances as a Hadrami diaspora, “a society of the absent,” spread across the Indian Ocean. Its members, like the buried ‘Alawī ancestors at Tarim, required constant “revivification.” For some this was achieved through genealogies associated with the ‘Alawī Way, transformed and reworked on journeys, which sometimes spanned generations, away from, returning to, and circumventing Tarim.