The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach.

• Author: Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud
• Position: Review

Dale F. Eickelman. 3rd ed. Prentice Hall, 1998. 388 pps. including author and subject indexes, and glossary. Paper $36.00

Reviewed by Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

The third edition of Dale Eickelman's introductory textbook on the anthropology of the Middle East has been expanded to include Central Asia. The inclusion of this region of the former Soviet Union is a timely and welcome addition to an already important and useful text.

The book successfully meets its two stated goals. The first is to provide an introduction to the anthropology of the Middle East and Central Asia, the second to indicate how the study of these regions contributes to the main currents in anthropology. Four themes about these regions are emphasized throughout the text to meet the latter goal: local expressions of world religions; cultural identities in complex societies; transformations in cultural values and social relations in the context of changing political economies; and interpretations of these regions' societies and cultures by Westerners and members of these communities themselves.

The book's eleven chapters are divided into five sections. The introductory section deals with the difficulties in and different ways of defining the Middle East and Central Asia, the basic ecological and demographic features of each region, styles of contemporary anthropological inquiry, and what might be called the 'proto-ethnographic' descriptions of these regions' societies and cultures which were produced by Europeans involved in various imperialist projects during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Necessarily, behind and within these descriptions lie interpretations deriving from unequal power relations. Eickelman addresses the imbeddedness of both interpretation and power in description through brief discussions of Ibn Khaldun's historical sociology and Said's critique of Orientalism.

The second section is composed of chapters on the study of cities, villages, and pastoral nomadism. As is the case throughout the book, in these chapters Eickelman utilizes well-documented case studies to discuss the subject at hand. However, instead of presenting a mere synthesis of existing literature, Eickelman provides readers with refreshing expositions on the respective phenomena through consistent invocation of an interpretive framework emphasizing the production of meaning though practice/praxis ("how patterns of symbolic representations are generated in the everyday world of social...