The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach.

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 experience, how they shape social practice, and how they are in mm modified by it," p. 222. For ethnographic and theoretical illustration Bourdieu's work is referenced repeatedly throughout the text, as is Eickelman's own work, and that of Gellner and Clifford and Hildred Geertz, giving the whole volume, including its theoretical discussions, a North African, if not Moroccan accent).

The third section of the book considers tribes, kinship, marriage and the family, the self, gender, ethnicity, and the multiple ideologies conditioning the various worldviews present in the complex societies of the Middle East and Central Asia. The fourth section discusses orthodoxy and reform in Islamic history, saints, sufis, Shiism, and the educational foundation of local social authority. The fifth section focuses on different conceptions and perceptions of state authority, and the increasing attention to multivocality and reflexivity in Middle Eastern ethnography. Central Asia is far from being equally represented throughout the volume, and attention to the region is particularly sparse in this final section, but Eickelman is candid about this disproportionality when stating that for Central Asia this book is intended only to suggest "points of departure" (p. viii) for future study of the region.

There are clear and understandable reasons for Central Asia not being equally represented in this book, but the explicit inter-regional orientation of this edition highlights Eickelman's sensitivity to and support of interdisciplinary. There are references to the complementarity between anthropology and history throughout the book. Indeed, a major lacuna in the contemporary anthropological understanding of Central Asia is a thoroughgoing social historical comprehension of Russo-Soviet colonization of the region. It can be inferred that Eickelman advocates anchoring future anthropological study of Central Asian systems and/or expressions of cultural symbols, meaning, practice, experience, representation and translation to the roots of the region's social history.

The anthropological study of Central Asia is just beginning to open up to Western scholars, but there is a substantive literature in Russian on the history of this region. Despite this scholarship's pronounced ideological bias, perhaps more of it could have been cited, if only for the reference of those who are just starting to learn about the region. Editorial constraints prohibit unlimited citation, and while recognizing that quality and originality of work bears heavily on proportional representation, it should be noted that in terms of non-English sources (anthropological and historical) there is a disparity in the number of citations in this book in favor of French and Arabic over those in Russian, Persian, and Turkish. When sorting through a bibliographic mix of inter-regional studies, interdisciplinarity, and multiple thematic foci there are bound to be gaps and omissions. But if future editions of this book are expanded, potentially rich subject matter such as 'the history of Turkish tribes in Central Asia' could be referenced, if not meaningfully discussed, without too great a sacrifice in overall length. While not advocating transforming this introductory anthropology text to a basic historical reader, a short introductory section on medieval Islamic history might be included in a future edition, particularly given the intensified cultural exchange between the Middle East and Central Asia which occurred during that period. Such expansion would make the analytical unification of these regions appear more as a natural socio-historical grouping than a pairing predicated on the political possibilities of academic research.

One way to assess the degree of distinction between these regions is to look at what separates them in the first place, and Afghanistan perhaps best symbolizes the boundaries and bridges between the Middle East and Central Asia. There is a conspicuous absence of using Afghanistan's recent (post-1978) experience to discuss the possibilities and failures of modern politicized Islam. This omission is especially apparent because the Afghan mujahideen are so often (but incorrectly) credited with 'defeating the Soviets,' which is said to have led to directly the collapse of the U.S.S.R., and therefore the opening of Central Asia for the business of Western scholarship. Eickelman relies on a few authorities when discussing Afghanistan in the text, namely, Robert Canfield, Richard and Nancy Tapper, and to a lesser extent Jon Anderson (the works of Benedicte Grima, Margaret Mills, and Audrey Shalinsky are cited but not incorporated into the text). Notable absences concerning the anthropology of Afghanistan include, among others, the works of Olivier Roy and Ashraf Ghani, the latter being an Afghan anthropologist of Afghanistan. The closest thing to an indigenous voice cited for things Afghan actually comes in connection with Ahmed's and Barth's ethnographies of "Pathans," a social category often and problematically assimilated with "Pashtuns," "Pukhtuns," and "Afghans." Eickelman rightly discredits some of Ahmed's work as doing a disservice to any potential 'Islamic anthropology' on the grounds of plagiarism (p. 367, footnote 118). Ahmed has elsewhere been exposed as falsely representing himself as a "Pukhtun" (here equated with "Pathan"), which is relevant because his writings are predicated on his claimed ethnographic authority as a member of the community he 'studied' (as a political agent of the Pakistani neo-colonial administration of the 'tribal territories'!). Given this justifiable distancing from Ahmed and his work, Eickelman's citing him to validate the authority of al-Beruni as both a "Muslim and anthropologist" (p. 52) seems counterproductive. But more importantly, reference to the ethnography of "Pathans" in the context of discussing the anthropology of Pashtuns and Afghanistan brings to the fore the challenge of limiting the anthropological and historical study of the Middle East and Central Asia to these regions alone. "Pathans" are a problematic social category because of the term's derivation from British colonialism in South Asia. By lumping, however implicitly, the study of Pathans, the vast majority of whom reside in North India, into the anthropology of Pashtuns and Afghanistan, and by extension the anthropology of either or both the Middle East and Central Asia, Eickelman demonstrates the important fact of these regions' cultural and historical connections to South Asia. A future edition of this text could be usefully expanded to include South (and Southeast) Asia, making for a more comprehensive introduction to the anthropology of Islam authored by one of the most erudite scholars of Muslim societies.

On the minor side, there are at least two citation/typographical errors: p. 173, N. Tapper's "Matrons and Mistresses" article is in vol. 21, no. 1 of the European Journal of Sociology; and p. 202, note 83, Zelig and Selig Harrison are the same person, Selig being correct. These minute technical details notwithstanding, the book should be an essential component of any undergraduate reading list on the anthropology of the Middle East and/or Central Asia. It would be equally useful for those approaching the study of either region from a different disciplinary or area studies tradition, such as graduate students of history who are reading outside of their fields of expertise for qualifying exams. Teachers of any social science discipline who run basic survey courses dealing with either region would also benefit from mining this valuable text for lecture material.

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.