By now it is a platitude to claim that social scientists have long underlined the important role of the state in Turkish political life. The “strong Turkish state,” the “centralizing Turkish state,” the “transcendental Turkish state,” the “bourgeois Turkish state” have all been problematized, elaborated, and questioned by students of social studies. However, Yael Navaro-Yashin's work is the much needed and most welcome anthropological study of the state in Turkey. Faces of the State, unlike any other book on the subject, shows us what the state means in people's lives and how people endorse and cultivate statism in their public life. The author focuses on the issue of secularism that has long defined the state in Turkey, and she interrogates in all its complexity how secularism is lived in private and championed in public in a context of increasing religious observance.