The ways that sexual activity, ideas about race, and the construction of class sensibilities influenced each other are the central concerns of Kirsten Fischer's Suspect Relations. Focusing on the experiences of ordinary people rather than the colonial elite, she uses court records and travel literature to study how the sexual conduct of Native Americans, Anglo-Americans, and African Americans, and public responses to that conduct influenced the construction of race and class consciousness in northeastern North Carolina during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Matthew Connelly's thoroughly researched and gracefully written volume adds an important dimension to our understanding of Algeria's struggle for independence. While the Algerian revolution has been the subject of numerous scholarly accounts, relatively little attention has been paid to the nature and context of the diplomatic efforts that played such an important role in the outcome of the conflict. It is here that Connelly makes an important and highly original contribution.

Working ethnographers know that cultural contradictions often hide in plain sight. We may represent such contradictions in our monographs as deep, dark secrets it has taken an expert to unveil, but such nods to the demands of academic theatre tend to violate the sense in which they are very much visible on the surface of daily life. Argyrou's argument focuses on one such contradiction in the culture of anthropology itself: quite obviously, anthropologists both make a living out of claiming that cultures and people shaped by cultures are different from one another while at the same time attacking those who propound racist and ethnocentric arguments by asserting that at bottom people and cultures are in the most important respects all the same. The burden of Argyrou's short, impressively well-argued monograph is to show that this contradiction is present in all versions of anthropology (Victorian, modern, post-modern) and that it dooms the discipline to a kind of incoherence, at least in theoretical and political terms, if not ethnographic ones.

In this “exercise in the sociology of anthropology” (p. xii), Susantha Goonatilake portrays contemporary anthropology of Sri Lanka as “worse than anything colonial anthropology wrought, and, in fact, worse than the colonial writings of the 19<+>th and early 20<+>th centuries” (xiii). Goonatilake focuses his attacks on selected works by Gananath Obeyesekere, Richard Gombrich, Bruce Kapferer, and Stanley Tambiah, and in the last chapter widens his critique to include almost every other scholar of Sri Lanka. While Goonatilake offers very good summaries of these texts and provides some pointed critiques, especially of Tambiah's more explicitly political writings, his analysis does not add up to an effective dismissal of post-colonial anthropological thought on Sri Lanka. While Goonatilake's book seems to try to be a Sri Lankan version of Ronald Inden's Imagining India, he undermines this ambitious project with his personal political animosities and his misreadings of anthropology.

As the intriguing title of this extraordinary study of Mende social life and history suggests, things are seldom what they seem. Indeed, the cover illustration of the inner side of a Poro society mask suggests this hidden complexity. Inscribed with magic squares which refer to passages from the Qur'an which give its wearer special powers and protection, this mask also hides an individual's identity while presenting a public face. However, Mariane Ferme focuses not on masks and masquerade ritual but rather on an examination of the underlying cultural logic of “strategies of concealment” associated with everyday things, such as hammocks and fishing nets. It is through an analysis of these unassuming things, Ferme argues, that the social dynamics as well as the historical and political economy of this region may best be understood. While this study took place in a small Mende village in southeastern Sierra Leone beginning in 1985—before the “War of Theft” of the 1990s began—it provides a means for understanding how everyday conflict occurs and how it may escalate in unpredictable, contestable, and violent ways, of particular relevance for contemporary Sierra Leone. For, as the author observes, “The valuing of a whole range of cultural skills aimed at producing and interpreting deferred meaning is partly the product of a violent history—reflecting regional and global forces” (7).

The history of the Andean region is permeated by violence of conquest, a violence that resonates through contemporary relationships of profound social, economic, and political asymmetry in the nation-states of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Although scholars of the Andean region have analyzed colonial and post-colonial structures of power, they have tended to emphasize “ethnicity” and “class” to the exclusion of “race.” In Cholas and Pishtacos, Weismantel brilliantly demonstrates the intertwining of racial and sexual discourses in the Andes. Drawing evidence from a broad range of popular and scholarly material, she integrates archival documents, folklore, festivals, classic works by novelist José María Arguedas and photographer Martin Chambi, and descriptions of the people and events from her long ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador. As she notes, each of these genres “demands it own form of interpretation, and offers a different kind of truth” (p. xxiv). In weaving together these distinctive genres, Weismantel creates a powerful intertextual narrative that illuminates the complex discourses naturalizing economic inequality and grounding social hierarchies in the Andes and throughout the Americas.

Few, if any, countries in modern history have been as willing as Turkey to adopt Western forms and life-styles without external colonial force. Beginning in the final days of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, and continuing with increasing intensity during the early decades of the Turkish Republic, local elites were committed to importing Western modernity while nationalizing it. In Modernism and Nation Building, Sibel Bozdoğan traces the active role played by state-employed Ottoman and Turkish architects in this process as they literally “built the nation.” By bringing together rich historical and archival resources—from architectural styles of buildings to curricula of architecture schools, and from ceremonial building competitions to popular magazines—the author presents an innovative approach to the social, cultural, and political relevance of architecture, especially in a non-postcolonial nationalist project.

In reading across disciplinary boundaries, it is always interesting to encounter a work defending what was once taken for granted in one's “home” discipline. Lockert's study begins with what may be a provocative statement for anthropologists but apparently is not for political scientists: “only a few contemporary students of comparative politics employ culture as a prominent explanatory variable” (ix). Lockert explains that while culture was significant to comparativist scholars in the 1950s and 1960s, a more deductive approach using rational choice theory has become increasingly popular since the 1980s. Throughout the book, Lockert seems to be in dialogue with rational choice and institutional theorists, responding to anticipated criticisms and pointing out how culturally informed theories can be more complete.

This book is an insightful, carefully researched account of the experiences of Chinese students who attended college in the United States between 1900 and 1927. Ye examines how their experiences transformed their views of nationalism, politics, professionalism, race, gender roles, morality, and leisure.

One has to admire Circe Sturm's courage to undertake what is undeniably the most volatile and sensitive issue in American Indian communities today. An anthropologist, Sturm conducted her fieldwork in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, where she solicited tribal members to speak about how identity politics work within the Cherokee Nation. To outsiders, “Cherokee” must seem a simple term, but Sturm shows that it is multitudinously complex. Cherokees whom Sturm talked to or heard others talk about were often categorized under rubrics denoting family heritage or phenotype (“white-Cherokees,” “full-bloods,” “mixed-bloods,” “black freedmen”). But as Sturm learned, these genealogical and racial labels simultaneously serve as metaphors describing how people behave and live.

On page one of his 1887 essay Gemmeinschaft and Gessellschaft, Ferdinand Tønnies distinguished two sorts of relationships resulting in associations conceived of as things or beings: “The relationship itself, and also the resulting association, is conceived of either as real and organic life—this is the essential characteristic of the Gemeinschaft (community); or as imaginary and mechanical structure—this is the concept of the Gessellschaft (society).” Whether Benedict Anderson was making specific reference to the passage in the title of Imagined Communities (1983), it is in any case a passage critical to specifying the significance of his evocative phrase. Reading Anderson through Tønnies we can see that an imagined community would not simply be a group that is not real in the conventional sense, whatever real might mean in this case. According to Tønnies' logic, an imagined community would be a formalized abstract translocal social-system conceptualizing itself as a concrete face-to-face local group, like, say, a family. The phrase would not delineate an evolutionary phase according to the logic of classic social thought (community[rarrtl ] society[rarrtl ] imagined community); it would identify the figure in terms of which an “association” is conceived of as “a thing or being,” which is to say, it would identify a metaphor. One thing Anderson is apparently saying, then, is that this particular metaphor, society conceived as community, and not the concept of society alone, is of primary significance for understanding political representation, sentiment, and mobilization in late modern times.

Thomas Blom Hansen has in short order but with considerable deliberation published two detailed examinations of the rise of, and dynamics within, communal politics in contemporary, democratic India. Hansen assembles a variety of theoretical tools from a selection of disciplines to explore the roots of Hindu chauvinist politics and the violence it has engendered in the past few decades. Although he does not apply his analysis to consider other religious polities, both books offer reflections useful in deliberations regarding the nature of democracy and the unpredictable internal forces that are mastered by no one, yet which often master nations.

At times in intellectual life the appropriate response can only be to stand and applaud. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's foray into the world of eighteenth-century historiography provides us with one such moment. He draws on archival and library research in Spain, France, England, the United States, and Mexico to challenge and revise dominant understandings of eighteenth-century historical practice. In so doing, he recreates the various historiographical tendencies, debates, and innovations existing on both sides of the Atlantic during this era. One result is the demolition of the notion of a unitary—and, explicitly or implicitly in this formulation, primitive and backward—“Spanish mind.” However, Cañizares-Esguerra achieves far more than this as he leads us through an analysis of the various ways that the period's intellectuals, primarily in Spain and “Spanish” America, constructed knowledge about the pre-Colombian American past.