Where the world ended. Re-unification and identity in the German borderland. By Daphne Berdahl. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999. xiii + 294 pp. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN 0 520 21477 3.

Disparate diasporas. Identity and politics in an African-Nicaraguan community. By Edmund T. Gordon. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1998. xiv + 330 pp. Pb. ISBN 0 292 73857 9.

Inside the revolution. Everyday life in Socialist Cuba. By Mona Rosendahl. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. x + 197 pp. Pb.: £11.95. ISBN 0 8014 8412 X.

Burden of dreams. History and identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine. By Catherine Wanner. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. 1998. xxvii + 255 pp. Pb.: £15.50. ISBN 0 271 01793 7.

Four books, four ethnographies, four resolute answers to a question that anthropologists are subjected to so often: does the discipline's relevance go beyond the specificity of small-scale community study? Or, in other words, can anthropology transcend the social, geographical, methodological and epistemological limits seemingly imposed on it by its ethnographic focus? Can it contribute to analyses of wider political and ideological phenomena such as revolutions or the post-communist transition? These four monographs, based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba, Germany, Nicaragua and Ukraine, are convincing in their univocal answer. The answer is yes.